


Soloist

by Eccentric_Hat



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Backstory, Ballet, Gen, Living abroad, Travel, Trope Subversion, adventures in various world cities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-05-16 05:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19311553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eccentric_Hat/pseuds/Eccentric_Hat
Summary: There are a lot of reasons why a child might not have a soulmark. It might be a simple issue of irregular skin pigmentation, or the mark might arrive late. Or the child might have another kind of soulmate. Usually these things work themselves out.In the meantime, for Minako at least, there’s ballet.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Growing up, grantwriting, going abroad, grinning, and experimentally hanging out in Parisian cafés.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enormous thanks to [postmodern_robot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/postmodern_robot) and [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly) for beta reading this story.

Minako’s teacher says: “Elbows up. Don’t let them sag. Higher. Good. Now put your hands out farther in front of you so your arms round out. That’s a good start. Don’t let the insides of your elbows show. Imagine that you’re showing off your arms but you don’t want anyone to see your soulmark.”

Minako does, and does, and does, but at the last instruction she smiles a little smugly. It is easy for her to hide her soulmark. Nobody can see it at all. It’s definitely there—everybody has one, and they’re all different. Minako’s is just hard to see. Sometimes that happens. She will have plenty of time to think about this later. For now, she considers it just one of several things that make her a little bit better at ballet than everyone else in her class. She has long arms and legs for her age, and she has high arches in her feet, and she has a soulmark that’s easy to hide. It’s nice. But it’s just a nice thing; Rika has better turnout, and Sugako is better at spotting her head when she turns, and little Hiroko, who often waits with Minako for their moms to pick them up after class, is better at the stretch where you sit on the ground with your soles together and lean forward to touch your head to your feet. So Minako has plenty of work to do if she wants to be better than them.

* * *

Minako’s parents are right that some people’s marks come in later than others. There are lots of ways for this to happen. Most people (say the brochures Minako’s parents leave on an end table) are born with a visible mark, darker or lighter than the skin surrounding it, but not if their skin can’t produce much pigment—then they have to go to dermatologists to discern the shape of their mark. Sometimes the doctor gives them a tattoo, but if they don’t get one they have to rely on the sense anyone gets when they come close to their soulmate, the slight insistent pull between your mark and theirs. According to the brochures it’s a resistible feeling, and most people get used to it quickly; but you hear a lot of songs about it, and the movies are always playing it up. Or some people don’t get their marks until later, sometimes as late as puberty. Those are the usual reasons for a young child not to have a visible mark. It’s nothing to worry about.

Then again, someone might not have a mark at all because they might have an empathic soulmate connection instead. That’s harder to figure out, and it doesn’t start all at once. Adolescents tend to have strong and confusing feelings anyway, so it can take a long time to understand when some feelings are coming from a soulmate connection. Sometimes soulmate empathy creates feedback loops that make it hard to identify the causes of your own emotions. This is the topic of a sub-field of psychotherapy, and of a number of books that show up in the Okukawa household around the time Minako is ten.

A few rare souls (according to the section of the public library where Minako browses at eleven and twelve but knows she’s too young to check anything out without drawing attention) experience none of these things but develop sudden and vivid synesthesia the first time they touch their soulmate—hearing colors, smelling music. This is unpredictable, since you get no sign it is going to happen until a physical connection is made.

All of these things are possible, and none of them are inevitable, and meanwhile Minako turns in her elbows and dances.

Minsko at seven years old loves ballet class, but she likes riding her bicycle, too, and drawing pictures with crayons. Most little girls she knows like most of those things, more or less. Ballet hasn’t called her or chosen her. She’s just good at it, and then better than the rest of her class. Unlike most of the things that she tries, she understands how to get better at it. It’s a comprehensible kind of work, offering steady progress and a beautiful result. Later, when she grows up, she’ll accept the fact that ballet requires not just repetition but understanding, artistry, making choices. All of that is required to be great. But for now, she isn’t focused on greatness. She just wants to improve.

The notion of a professional career, of actually being a ballerina and not just having people call her one in a cute way, takes years to come into focus. Minako lives in Hasetsu, in Saga Prefecture. Real professional ballet doesn’t happen in places like that. Maybe it happens in Kyoto or Nagasaki, and certainly it happens in Tokyo, but mostly, ballet seems to belong in Moscow and Paris and New York. Could she ever go to those places? Maybe, maybe, but that’s years and years away, and today she has to practice her tendus and her port-de-bras: first position, second, fourth, fifth. Again.

The hardest part is that you are never supposed to look like you’re struggling. “You’re not athletes,” her teacher tells the class. “Ballet audiences don’t want to think about how difficult your work is or wonder whether you can stay on your feet. They want to feel certain that you are going to pull it off.”

She stops Minako when her turns are too labored, or when she’s supposed to run from one spot to another and she actually runs, sometimes swinging her arms a little, anxious to get there on time. “This is still part of the dance, Minako! Everything you do when you’re dancing is performance. Even if you’re just getting into position for something else, you’re still dancing.”

Later in that lesson, she apparently notices that Minako is having a hard time looking graceful while wiping the sweat off her face and delicately picking through her bag for her water bottle. “Hey,” she says. “It’s okay to stop performing when you’re offstage. It’s important to be able to do that.”

* * *

The first time Minako goes to a ballet competition, at age ten, she places third in her age group. She expected to win—she just hadn’t thought about the possibility of not winning. But third place is nice, and anyway she has plenty of time to do better. She gets a little trophy, and her picture appears in the local newspaper, tiny and looking serious in her baby tutu and flat ballet shoes. She goes back to the studio and practices every day, trying to improve her turnout, and makes progress at an agonizingly slow pace, her knees pointing a tiny fraction of a degree farther from each other every day. She spots her head during turns so sharply and rapidly that she gives herself headaches; she strains herself in her arabesques as if she could make her limbs longer.

Her teacher tells the class, “You have to learn your technique over and over for the whole time you are dancing. You’re never finished.”

At eleven she goes back to the contest and takes first place in her age group, and again at twelve. The notices in the paper start to refer to her as a bit of a local celebrity, like the high school athletes who win games. She’s growing, and she knows it isn’t because of practice that her limbs are getting longer, but she feels accomplished anyway, admires the way her legs look in the studio mirror when she runs through her exercises at the barre, and then has to get out of that habit because admiring herself is distracting her from getting better. She knows that she’s the best dancer in her class, and so does everyone else. If anyone is jealous they don’t bother her with that information. Most twelve-year-old girls in ballet class want to be good but know that school is more important. Minako supposes that she should be making school a higher priority, but ballet is happening _now_. She’s afraid that if she ignored it for a little while she’d lose it. She learns how to do things, memorizes the instructions given by her teacher and repeats them until the movements get into her body and she forgets how she learned them. Then she gets too confident and has to re-learn the instructions again. The cycle repeats.

At thirteen she gets her first pointe shoes, moves up a division in the contest, and wins first again. This time the Hasetsu paper sends someone to interview her when she gets home.

The reporter for the local arts beat is professional and kind; Minako wonders if this is condescension, but she decides to take the act at face value. She’s a performer, after all. She answers questions about her ballet classes and her ambitions for the future: “I want to keep dancing,” no details. The reporter doesn’t press her too hard about her future career but does ask, “To whom did you dedicate your performance?”

Minako thinks about the question. There are warring superstitions at play here. The whole ballet world is always a little Russia-crazed, and in Russia it’s traditional to dedicate a music or dance performance to one’s soulmate; ballerinas like to provide quotes to the press about love giving them grace. But in Japan it’s traditionally considered bad luck to talk about your soulmate before you’ve met them, at least in public. She decides to do an end-run around the whole question. “My mother,” she says. “She takes me to Tokyo for the competition every year even though it’s a long trip. Ballet is a lot of work. For everyone involved.”

The interview runs with a picture of Minako from the competition, and her mother’s friends cut it out of the paper and send it to her to make sure she’ll have copies. Minako doesn’t like how her legs look shorter in the picture than in the studio mirrors. “I look like a _baby_ ,” she whines.

Her mother never laughs at her when she says things like this. Instead she seems to consider this comment, looks at the photo again, and says, “Your extension is improving, but I don’t think this picture captures it. It’s a bad angle.” She doesn’t put the picture up on the fridge but she gives one to Minako’s father, and he tacks it up on the little bulletin board in his office. He sleeps there most nights.

That year’s win gets her a letter from a teacher in Tokyo, a woman named Imai Fuyumi who had a short, distinguished career before retiring with an injury. Minako knows who she is. People in the Japanese ballet world talk about her the way ordinary people talk about bands that put out one great album and then broke up. She’s still new as a teacher, and studying with her won’t mean direct access to a company. But she’s already a legend as a performer, an enormous step up from Minako’s teacher in Hasetsu, and it’s not as if anyone else is offering.

Still, it won’t be logistically easy. Minako’s family lives here in Saga, and she’s only thirteen. Her father’s law practice is here; he can’t easily move. Her mother is a realtor, and it would be hard for her to go too, but maybe, maybe…

It’s difficult and bizarre having conversations like this with her parents, taking the leading role, as if she’s somehow become the head of the family—as if she’s ascended to some throne and they are her regents. It hardly seems possible they can believe in her talent enough to talk about moving, about her parents’ careers following hers. Can they afford this? What will they have to do to afford it? Minako’s parents have never had an answer when she asked them why she didn’t have any siblings, and sometimes she wonders if she came into the world and left no room in the family for anyone else. Her parents could barely even stay together after she started dancing, and they’re soulmates—did she do that?

Whether or not she was responsible at first, it seems obvious that she’s responsible now, when her parents agree that her father will stay in Hasetsu with his job, and her mother will come with her to Tokyo and find work there, and they will see each other at holidays or whenever they are able.

After that it’s a long time before Minako gives another interview to the newspaper in Hasetsu.

* * *

Imai-sensei has a small group of students and works closely with them every day. Minako is a little wistful when she hears about schools in London or New York that are attached to professional companies, where dozens of students live in dormitories and study intensively together, and the advanced students get invited to be apprentices and join the corps de ballet. It would be nice to have that kind of straight line to success. But then, she wonders, what if you failed it? If you studied for years and years at the Tokyo Ballet Gakko and didn’t get invited to apprentice with the Tokyo Ballet—what would you do? You’d have to go look for a job somewhere else, after spending your whole education aiming at one particular place. That would be hard. It’s hard not knowing where she will go when she’s old enough to be a professional, but at least she knows that she’ll have to figure that out, and this way if she decides to do something else it might not feel like such a failure. And anyway that’s years away, still. Today she’s going to a screening of _The Red Shoes_ with all her classmates, because the film club at the library is showing it and someone told her that all ballet students ought to watch it, and they’re a bunch of teenage clichés in pointe shoes.

The movie is sentimental and bombastic and ridiculous. Everyone somehow has a spotlight shining across their eyes at all times, and they’re all cut up about the idea of a ballerina wanting to get married, even though her soulmate works for the company and it would be really easy for them both to stay there. Minako’s classmate Anzu shrieks in something like performative horror, and something like joy, at the part when Moira Shearer dances herself to death. “Imagine giving yourself up on the altar of dance!” Anzu always talks like that. She’ll get a corps de ballet contract in Kyoto at eighteen, and she’ll dance there for one year before she quits and goes to college to study urban planning.

Minako won’t do that, even though in the future it will never be easy to explain why she kept it up when others didn’t. Any day there’s an opportunity to quit, but she doesn’t have to, and she doesn’t want to, and even though it feels recklessly ambitious she lets the idea of a professional career come into real focus in her mind. Periodically her mother asks her how things are going at school, the weird school for actor and dancer kids that Minako attends when she’s not at the studio, and asks if any of the subjects there especially interest her. It’s important—she says gently—to have backup options. Minako hears this from other students sometimes, too, and she takes it as seriously as she can, which is not very. She attends advanced ballet class in the morning, goes to school for three or four classes—English and Japanese and history and math—and then she goes back to the studio so she can attend a lower-level class for more practice, doing all the barre exercises on pointe to make them more challenging. Tokyo for her is small, just home and school and the studio and the bright, crowded spaces between them full of fast-moving people, Minako slipping sideways between them to get to the next place. She still doesn’t feel anything like a pull toward a soulmate, not even with all of these people around, but then, she’s so focused that she might have just missed it. It’s a relentlessly narrow life but it’s all animated by the promise and possibility of something bigger. 

If Minako really tries, she can imagine quitting and doing something else. She’s watched her mother long enough to understand a little about what her job is like and to hear about the different lives of her clients, the young professionals and the university people and the people who work in big offices doing office things. Minako will go into that world if she has to, but she likes the life she has now. Routinely she asks herself whether this is what she wants, and by the time she’s done with school the answer has solidified, little by little, into a yes. Yes to the work and the constant learning and the physical diligence and the risk of failure; yes to choosing this life and getting to live it. Somebody gets to do it and it might as well be her.

* * *

Still, she thought something would change when she finished high school. Not much does.

Minako makes a tape and tries to get auditions, and mostly can’t; she keeps going to class. She keeps practicing. She’s still taking classes with Imai-sensei. It’s frustrating—she is old enough to be dancing full time, and she should be auditioning for professional companies, but she can’t seem to get in the door. Minako will object to anyone suggesting that Imai-sensei is anything but a world-class dancer and an excellent teacher, but it’s clear that her name is not enough to get a student of hers into an apprenticeship with the Tokyo Ballet. Minako is already self-conscious about how much her mother had to give up to enable a dance education in Tokyo to begin with. She really has to start earning her own way now, but doing that is confusing and difficult. Who wants to hire a ballet dancer?

She gets a part-time gig with a small company that travels to places where there is less competition. They might perform in a town like Hasetsu, if Hasetsu weren’t so far away. They don’t put on feature-length productions—nothing that ambitious. They do scenes instead, the standards like the Rose Adagio from _Sleeping Beauty_ , the final scene from _Gisèle_. Minako has always wanted to dance Aurora, and if the only way she can do that is in a school auditorium, she’ll take it. Meanwhile she teaches a class once a week at Imai-sensei’s studio for twelve and thirteen year olds—anyone older than that is too close to her own age to see her as an authority, and anyone younger is, according to sensei, much too hard to teach. “You’ll need a lot more experience before you’re ready to teach beginners,” she tells Minako. So that one class is a meager source of income, and she earns a little more as a performer.

Minako is a champion at scoring discounted tickets to the ballet—whether she gets there by bothering her teacher’s friends for comps, waiting in the rush line on performance day, going in on season subscriptions with three or four other students so they can share the subscriber discount, or just keeping an open ear around the school for anyone with an extra ticket.

Getting dressed for the ballet always means walking a tricky line between what she wants and what she can afford. She’s good at dressing the part of a young professional, in slim belted dresses that are simple enough it’s hard to tell they’re a year or two out of date, and flats that are cute enough to make up for not being heels. She does up her makeup right and keeps her hair simple—long, even, no bangs. She blends in on the street but at the ballet she wants to do more than blend in: she wants to look like she belongs. On nights when she has tickets she’ll line her eyes wider as if she’s trying to make them visible from the stage, or she’ll wear her flats with the strap across the instep like a child’s ballet slippers; she puts on her earrings of long silver dangling chains to look a little more artsy than the patrons who will be wearing pearls. It’s hard to say whether any of this gets noticed. She keeps doing it on the theory that you have to fake it until you make it, but she’s keenly aware that she might just end up faking it until her time runs out.

She’s in one of these outfits when she takes her classmate Emiko to see the Tokyo Ballet, the autumn she’s nineteen. The headlining piece that evening is Paul Béjart’s _Bolero_ , a dance for one woman and a corps of men—the woman standing on top of an enormous circular table, and the men seated behind her.

The piece is almost twenty minutes long and the ballerina is constantly moving—not traveling far, and not leaping, but her whole body pulses continuously. The circle of men around her are drawn into the dance with agonizing slowness. Is the woman powerful, or lonely, or both? Her motions are repetitive, hypnotic; is she weaving a spell, or is there a spell on her? There’s something a little disturbingly Rite-of-Springish about the whole thing, as if the dance is going to come to a tragic crisis; but the closer they get to the end, the more the ballerina’s face goes from a studied and neutral intensity to a grin that deepens and gets fiercer, until every time she raises her arms the men around her rise too, coming up on their toes until she releases her arms and they go down again; she seems to convince them with one gesture to rise and fall in unison. She looks ferociously satisfied as they start to circle in closer around her, as the radius shrinks, until finally the inner ring of them takes the step of climbing up on the ballerina’s table, and she draws up her arms one more time and on the final fanfare flourish of the music they all collapse. When the lights come back up for the curtain call, the ballerina is glowing like an incandescent bulb—eyes wide, mouth grinning like the cat that’s got the cream. She’s won something, and conclusively so, but what it is—that feels difficult to name.

Standing around in the lobby at intermission, Minako asks Emiko what she thinks, not because she wants to know but just to raise the subject so she can talk about it herself.

“I had chills,” Emiko says, and they can agree on that much. But then she says, “It’s so _cruel_. Almost bitter. It left a weird taste in my mouth.”

“What’s cruel about it?” asks Minako. “You think _she_ was cruel?”

“No, I mean—the men were cruel, weren’t they? They were just waiting that whole time, and then they circled around and closed in.”

Minako feels disoriented. “But they weren’t in charge at all. I thought the focus was all on her. She was the one drawing them in.”

Emiko shrugs. “I mean, sure, it was framed that way, but it always is, isn’t it? It’s—” She looks away, apparently uncomfortable, to watch a woman near them adjust her wrap, which is silk and such an ugly shade of green that it must be fashion-forward. Emiko frowns and tries again. “All the time in ballet, the ballerina is always in front, and in the spotlight, but she’s still the one getting picked up and thrown, isn’t she? She’s the one getting supported by her partner. It’s all part of the show to pretend that isn’t true.”

Minako was ready to argue but not about this. She wishes she had a drink to fiddle with, but it hadn’t seemed worth the money. “I thought,” she says. “I thought she was magnificent.”

“Yes, she was wonderful! It’s so subtle, and so drawn-out. I wonder if people will appreciate how much stamina she showed up there.”

“Right.” Minako can feel it leaking away, the powerful sense of assurance she felt at the climax of the piece, and she grasps at straws. “It’s such a relentless rhythm, but I never felt like she was having trouble keeping up with it. The way she used her arms it was almost like she was conducting the music.” Which is true, and she noticed it early on in the piece, but there was so much else, and she’s worried she’s going to lose it, it’s all going to slip away before she can say to herself what it meant to her, that wide-eyed grinning commanding face, that relentless steady strength.

Later she’ll think about ways she wishes this conversation had gone. She’d wanted to say something about how the ballerina seemed almost like a siren, drawing in all those men with a winding, repetitive song until they drew close and she knocked them all down. But that wasn’t it either; she wasn’t as ferocious as that. Minako understands the truth of the story she’s been told only in what she remembers of the dance itself. It comes back to her in snatches when she’s thinking about something else—how it felt to watch that performance—and every time, she straightens her back a little and thinks about how she might become that steady, that sure. If she can’t explain in words what the piece means, she’s going to have to dance it herself. She has to take care not to miss her chance.

Later that winter, a pair of British ice dancers skate to an Olympic gold medal with a routine set to “Boléro.”

Minako likes figure skating well enough, certainly better than football or any of the other team sports people watch in bars, but ice dance has always seemed like a bizarre cousin of ballroom dance, formulaic and excessively focused on couples making romantic pictures. In any case she has little time for things like watching the Olympics. But after Torvill and Dean win perfect 6.0s across the board for their artistic expression, the routine gets repeated on the television every evening for a week, or so it seems, and Minako watches it thoughtfully. The program is not romantic, or not in a way she’s used to seeing. It’s not even clear if the two skaters are meant to represent two characters, or just a single soul struggling through a repetitive set of thoughts. She decides that she likes it, and then her memory of it gets tangled up with her memory of the Béjart, and then she spends a week with the melody running repetitively through her head at every moment that she isn’t dancing to something else; she practically marches to it when she walks down the street to class.

 _This isn’t enough_ , she says to herself, like a mantra as she walks. The Rose Adagio in school auditoriums is fine as a start but she isn’t going to settle for it permanently. She’s going to get up on that table in the center of the stage. She’s going to grab an audience’s attention and keep it.

She might need to leave Japan to do it.

Once Minako gets it into her head to go abroad, it’s all she can think about. She’s tried for every audition she can plausibly get in Tokyo. She knows all the companies and most of the teachers, and she’d make things socially and professionally complicated if she tried to leave Imai-sensei for another instructor. And anyway she doesn’t want any of them; she’s too familiar with their faults.

Abroad, though. She feels excited all of a sudden, like when she was little and moving to Tokyo, except it’s different now because it’s all her idea. She’s going to break a brand-new trail for herself.

She cuddles this pride to herself for a whole week and a half before admitting that she is going to have to ask for help after all. She doesn’t know how to get the attention of a foreign ballet teacher or school, or—well, she has the notion of a company with some kind of fellowship program, but maybe those don’t exist. She reads the dance magazines religiously, and there are some opportunities there, but half of them are in countries whose language she doesn’t speak. Is she going to try to learn enough French in secret to apply for a program in Paris all by herself, or is she going to swallow her pride? She goes to Imai-sensei and admits that she needs help, because she is stuck.

Imai-sensei makes some phone calls to people she knows from her performing days, and then she has them make some phone calls to people who speak languages she can’t, and she gets those people to agree that if the elusive and mysterious lost ballerina of Japan (meaning Imai-sensei herself—she lays this on a bit thick, apparently on purpose) will send tape of her most promising student, a girl who needs to go abroad to properly flourish, who has music in her toes and fingers and is eager to study further to learn how to use it—in short, she gets them to agree that if she sends them a tape, they will watch it. Of course they don’t promise anything more than that, but that’s a big step when it comes from teachers in Paris and Berlin and London, people whose names are a little familiar to Minako from the magazines but who, if they ever performed, haven’t been onstage for a decade or two. Minako pictures wrinkled old ballet masters wearing all black and sitting on wooden chairs turned backwards, leaning on the backrest with a cigarette in one hand and saying, “Ten more repetitions.” She doesn’t know if she’ll flourish under a teacher like that. It will certainly be a change from the rather young Imai-sensei, who tells her students quite frankly how proud she is of them, or how frustrated when they fail; who tells them she’s worried about giving them eating disorders, so they have to tell her if they start being afraid to eat. Imai-sensei has been Minako’s lifeline in Tokyo, and she’s nervous about cutting loose from her and leaving her mother too. But they make the tape anyway, and they send it off to Europe in bubble mailers with airmail stickers on them, and they cross their fingers.

* * *

The Paris Opera Ballet doesn’t have much room for dancers from anywhere else. They have their own school and hiring procedures, and Minako has nothing to offer them. But the POB doesn’t own the city of Paris or all its ballet masters, and despite their dominance there is other interesting work going on here. Imai-sensei put Minako in touch with a friend of hers from her early professional days, a beautiful dancer and idiosyncratic choreographer who makes his living nowadays through a combination of choreography, teaching, and performing modern dance that doesn’t tax the body as badly as ballet.

The money for Minako’s residency here is coming from a relatively new but extraordinarily well-endowed private foundation in Tokyo, to whom she sent videos of her performances and a detailed letter about all the ways in which she planned to change the ballet world. This was going to require a great deal of international study. She implied that she would have to travel to Paris and New York to truly understand the global landscape of ballet, and that it would be ideal for her to spend time outside the traditional ballet capitals as well, to learn about what local dance idioms were flourishing elsewhere; but she modestly requested only enough funds to spend half a year in Paris studying under a great teacher, to conclude with a public recital where she would prove to a Parisian audience what Japanese dancers could do.

This wasn’t exactly a lie. It’s hard to lie when describing what you would like to do if someone gave you enough money. But it was mostly made up on the spot when Minako decided she needed to look beyond Tokyo for her next career move. Minako is increasingly coming to believe that no one is ever going to believe in her until she grabs them by the lapels and tells them why they should, and so that is exactly what she has done. And now she is here in Noé Cason’s studio making faces at the mirrors.

Minako’s place in this studio is strange. She’s one of the students, more or less, but she’s neither a pre-professional teenager nor a hobbyist adult. She takes classes alongside the younger students, a small group, for the sake of keeping up her daily practice; and then she does intensive study with M. Cason.

They spend more time than she expected on her acting. Imai-sensei encouraged good facial expressions, of course, but it wasn’t a major focus of hers. Her aim was a pleasant, natural expression that didn’t distract from the movements. But Noé has her doing such enormous facial expressions that they seem to Minako like pantomime. “Are you a ballet dancer or Marcel Marceau,” she imagines asking him—mutters it to her toothbrush, sometimes, in the evening when she’s going over the day in her head. She’s not prepared to say it to his face, though. She feels ridiculous, but it does seem possible that he’s teaching her something she needs to know.

It’s not until she feels like she’s made an ass out of herself in the studio, flashing bizarrely gleeful faces every which way like a clown, that he finally says, “Okay. You can stop. How do you feel?”

Minako chews her lip, looking at him for a moment. “How much of the real answer do you want?”

He laughs a little. Minako has to give him credit for that; he doesn’t have a fragile ego. “I assume you’re tired, in pain somewhere, and sick of this exercise. Besides that, how did it feel dancing that variation?”

She thinks about it.

“I don’t think I felt in character, exactly. I still don’t really know who the character is in this variation. But I think I felt more airborne that time, if that makes sense.” She thinks about it a little more. “Like—it’s not that I made myself happy, exactly, but I felt kind of. Gleeful? Like I was going to have a good time just to spite you.”

He grins. “Excellent. Where was that feeling in your body?”

That’s a hard one. “In my chest, mostly.” She puts a hand to her sternum, then higher. “Like my heart was up here.”

“What does that do to your arms and your neck, when your heart moves up there?”

“I don’t know.” She moves her arms experimentally. “They want to float up, a little. And out. Expand.”

“ _Excellent_. Dance like that.”

She tries it. It changes. The dance is more buoyant, more open. Then they start over again doing the same variation with an exaggerated droopy sad face and she tries to dance the way that suggests.

“You see?” he says when they stop once again. “What you do with your face feeds back into how you feel, and how you feel informs your body. Once you fake an emotion you usually start to feel it, and then you can express it another way. You don’t have to psychoanalyze a role from the inside out like a method actor; you can find it from the outside in.”

Minako tries it, not just in the studio but when she’s walking the streets of Paris in her free time. She wears long sleeves every day, buys cheap scarves and ties them around her neck as chicly as if they were Hermès, hardens her smile, and perfects the art of walking through a neighborhood where she’s never been as if she knows exactly where she is going and why. She sits in cafés drinking black coffee and flirts with people there in an absurd mixture of Japanese, English, and ballet-studio French.

“Where is your soulmate?” asks Eric from Lyon, or Tobias from Leipzig, or, once, Mariah from Newcastle, and she tells melodramatic lies: her soulmate died young, her soulmate is a political prisoner somewhere, her soulmate rejected her.

It’s fun making up these stories, until one day it abruptly isn’t fun anymore. “I haven’t got one,” she tells Martin from Aix-en-Provence. “I never have.”

He was stirring artificial sweetener into his coffee when he asked the question, avoiding eye contact, but when he hears her answer he looks up in shock. “Really?” he says. “Never? How—what are you going to do?”

“What are _you_ going to do?” she asks, and this is a nonsensical response, just reflecting his question back at him, but he seems genuinely unsettled by the turn the conversation has taken and it takes him a moment to answer. When he speaks it sounds, absurdly, as if he might be about to cry.

“I’m going to continue searching,” he says. “I’m going to find them. Her. I think it is probably a woman but it’s taking such a long time…”

Minako doesn’t care for tears, and she feels a little guilty for provoking them. She responds, as in most situations, with bluntness. “I’m not going to be your confessor about all that,” she says. “I’m sure you’re doing a perfectly adequate job. If you want someone to take your mind off your search, well—” She gets a pen out of her handbag and writes down the telephone number of the sixth floor walk-up apartment she’s rented in the Latin quarter. “Give me a ring when you’re in a better mood.”

It takes him a week to call, but when he does his voice is steady, and his eyes, when he appears at her front door with a bottle of wine on a Thursday evening, are dry. The concierge looks at Minako with some kind of inscrutable judgment in her eyes and retreats to her office, and Minako takes her guest by the hand and leads him upstairs.

It starts well, the two of them at her tiny round kitchen table sipping wine out of jam jars.

“I hear ballet is very torturous,” he says.

“Is that the word you wanted?” Minako asks, sharper than she meant to be and immediately rebuking herself: _he’s not here for English practice_. “It’s hard work.”

“Is it worth it?”

She laughs. “Absolutely not!” Martin blinks in surprise but he must notice the gaiety in her tone, because he’s teasing when he asks, “So why put in all this work? There are other ways to learn a living.”

“Oh, are there? Nobody has ever told me that. I thought I’d have to dance or starve.” Is this mean-flirtatious thing working? It’s hard to tell; maybe she’ll try to scale it back. “What I mean is, if you start asking if it’s worth it, you’re asking the wrong question. ‘Worth’ is a—it’s how you talk about money. So what you’re asking is, when I rehearse every day, and take care of my diet, and feel in pain all the time, is that worth what the audience pays to see? Is it worth it for them to see me dance?” He looks more puzzled than attracted, but she’s committed to this bit now. “And of course it isn’t. They pay to come see something beautiful, and I hope they love it, but there are lots of other beautiful things to see. Lots of beautiful things without so much pain. Especially here in Paris! They could just watch a sunrise or go to Sainte-Chappelle.”

Martin lifts both his eyebrows and takes another sip of wine, lost.

Minako lets out a gust of breath and sets a grin on her face. “Anyway! Wrong question! You asked is it worth it. Art never is, probably. Not if you ask money questions. But the right question is will I keep doing it as long as I possibly can, and the answer to that is yes. So there you are. What do you do? Is that worth the effort?”

“I, ah.” He looks out the window as if he needs inspiration. “I don’t—I’m not sure how to say it in English. I have a normal job. It’s boring.”

“Well.” Isn’t he going to hold up his end of the conversation at all? “What do you do when you’re not at work?”

“Mostly I sit at home and feel sad.” He blushes. Maybe he didn’t mean to say that. “It’s been a bad time. Most of my friends are back in Provence.”

“That isn’t very far.”

“No, but I was the only one who dreamed of a life in Paris, you know? And I got it, and it’s lonely. That’s all.”

“So you started talking to foreign women in cafés.”

“It was better than sitting at home watching television.”

“Can’t you think of better things to do in Paris?”

“Honestly? No.” He keeps looking between her and the window, like he doesn’t want to maintain eye contact. “It’s a good place to be a tourist, and a good place to be in love. I suppose it’s a good place to be an artist. But when you are just a normal person and you aren’t in love, it’s just _métro, boulot, dodo_. Train, job, sleep, and then you do it again, and then you go out and drink a coffee. What else? People dream of coming here, and then you come here, and then you’re out of dreams. You know?”

“No, not really,” Minako says. She should probably be more polite, but she’s never considered it polite to lie. “I’m still chasing something. Do you always consider it a bad thing for people to get what they want? That’s depressing.”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe you have to be French to understand.”

This is so patently ridiculous that she feels a little of her warmth towards him go out of the room.

“Martin,” says Minako. “You sound a little depressed.” He looks uncomfortable, and she has no earthly idea what to say, so she does the daftest possible thing and kicks up her leg as high as she can while sitting in this rickety wooden chair and wearing jeans. “You should get better at _putting your feet up_.”

He laughs, and somehow they manage to change the subject. Minako talks about Hasetsu a little, though she never knows what to say about it, and she asks him a few questions about Aix, and they finish the bottle of wine that way. When it’s gone, Minako says, “Well. You managed not to cry,” and he smiles more genuinely than he did before, and thanks her, and kisses her lightly on both cheeks, and then he is gone.

So there’s that. She approached this visit with a sense of finality—if she turns out someday to have a soulmate, she won’t have waited for them. But then the evening ended so chastely that—well, if she was ever waiting, she still is.

Her lessons get increasingly demanding, until she has no more time for talking to strangers in cafés.

* * *

As the end of her time in Paris approaches she finds that she simultaneously wants to go home, and wants never to go home.

She misses hanging around the house on off days with her mother, gossiping lazily about the people they know and falling asleep in front of the television. She misses going shopping with her father, strolling the streets of Sasebo with a coffee and trying to convince him not to buy her things. She wants to eat real Japanese food again and relax into speaking her first language. She wants to celebrate holidays the way she did as a kid and stop second-guessing which way to look when she crosses the street.

But she also looks at her tiny Paris apartment sometimes and says to herself, _Look where I am._ She finds the groceries she wants in a Russian-run international store and feels so proud of herself she could crow. Everything is unfamiliar and so everything is an adventure: going to the movies, finding her way to a new restaurant, reading ballet reviews. She is learning some French from tapes (slowly slowly slowly) and she keeps getting caught between her three languages and forgetting the words for what she means, and it’s aggravating but somehow also wonderful. The world seems both bigger and smaller than it ever has before. She spends every day working in a studio doing what directors and choreographers tell her, and yet she feels as if she must be the freest person she has ever met: no soulmate, no children, only her body and the things it can do, the way it can communicate without using language at all. She might be homesick, but she’s not ready to call an end to this adventure.

So it’s back to the tapes and the letters and the trying to get auditions. It’s different this time, with a Parisian return address, with Cason on her résumé. She gets a foot in some doors. She shows up and shows what she can do.

There is a moment in the middle of Minako’s audition tour when she is in a train station in Tours in the middle of the night waiting for a connection, when the fatigue of travel gets so strong that it feels like mental clarity. She looks around her at long rows of chairs, the tall windows onto the night that reflect back the lights of the interior, the shut-down food kiosks and the ticket counters, and she thinks, “I might actually pull this off.”

She will remember this moment for a long time without ever trying to explain it. Three weeks later she’s offered a corps de ballet contract with the Royal Danish Ballet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Béjart's _Boléro_ is real, as are most of the ballets referenced in this fic. In general, dancers/choreographers/skaters who are only name-dropped are real people, while the ones who appear as characters are fictional.
> 
> The criticism of _The Red Shoes_ (namely, what's the fuss, they're in the same company, just let them get married) actually comes from George Balanchine as quoted in Maria Tallchief’s autobiography. A good read, as I recall it! But I read it about twenty years ago, so that recall is not super reliable.
> 
> In any case, I hope you enjoy, and I'll be back soon with chapter 2!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Denmark, dancing, days off, decisions, and the starving-artist act is a lot less cute in midcareer.

Copenhagen is wet and slightly chilly all the time, and the language is incomprehensible, and senior dancers keep throwing skeptical looks in Minako’s direction, and she has never been more full of joy.

Nothing that Minako has experienced in her life has so purely deserved the name of _work_ as dancing in the corps de ballet. She is given a task, and she completes it. Over and over again, with difficulty, with results. The company seems so enormous she can’t see around it. She thinks of her apartment like a subsidiary part of the theater complex, or as if the theater is a body and it exhales the dancers and inhales them again at predictable times of the day. No metaphor is quite sufficient for how enormous this feels, how encompassed she is by an endeavor many times larger than herself. She tries to explain it to one of her cohort once, when they’re waiting during a late rehearsal and both feeling a little stupid with fatigue; and Alina snorts and says it’s a good thing Minako didn’t have to read Marx or she might have become an ideologue. Minako doesn’t think so; she’s never taken politics very seriously, but maybe she would have if dance hadn’t gotten to her first.

For the first week after Minako and her class of new corps members join the company, they all behave with controlled, upright propriety, following directions as strictly as possible, and no one wants to intrude on each other’s privacy. Minako decides that if no one else is going to break the ice, she’ll do it, so she starts asking the other corps members personal questions at random and lets them believe this is just how things are done where she was brought up.

In her second week she dumps herself onto the studio floor next to a studious Danish girl named Veronika and asks her, “What do your parents do for a living?” She gets a startled but honest answer (mother delivers mail, father teaches history, and she had her ballet lessons subsidized by an otherwise estranged aunt) and from then on she has one person to talk to.

The next week she ambushes Alina, a dancer from Ukraine with wide eyes and lightning-fast feet, with a question about how she first learned to fouetté, and then she has two friends.

The third friend she makes is a young but formidably tall Turkish ballerina named Defne. She studied at the Royal Ballet School in London from the age of fifteen and speaks English considerably better than Minako, who used to consider herself proficient. Minako doesn’t have to come at her with a question because Defne beats her to the punch, dropping down next to her on the studio floor and announcing, “I’m never making soloist until they hire some taller men.”

Minako almost asks why not, but the answer is obvious. Defne is just shy of “too tall”: she can fit into the corps but only barely. They don’t have to do too much partnering, but it’s already clear that when a ballet requires that, Defne isn’t chosen for it. None of the men are tall enough to easily lift her or support her in paired moves and, “With my luck,” she continues, not paying attention to the fact that Minako hasn’t said anything yet, “my soulmate is going to be one meter tall.”

So that delivers another piece of information, and Minako decides to be frank in return and say, “Oh, well, I don’t have one at all.”

“Really?” Defne turns to look at her properly. “You’re sure you’re not an empath or a synesthete or something?”

Minako shrugs, trying to look careless like she did in Paris. Everyone knows she doesn’t have a visible mark—they all get a clear look at each other’s bodies every day at work. But people have always been eager to believe she has a different kind of soulmate. “I don’t know,” she says. “Definitely not an empath, unless I’m empathic with someone who never has any feelings. Synesthesia you never know for sure until it happens, but it does seem like there’s a psych profile and I don’t fit it. And I don’t believe in body swaps.”

Alina’s been shamelessly eavesdropping since Defne came over here, and she interrupts to say, “Aren’t Japanese soulmates connected by a red string of fate?”

Minako frowns. “No? That’s a metaphor. A folktale. It isn’t how things really happen.”

“What about languages?” says Veronika, leaning over Alina to get into the conversation.

Minako has heard this one before, about people who can automatically speak any language their soulmate can speak, but never from a doctor. “How would I know? Maybe I could understand Finnish or Tongan or Romansch, but I’ve never heard them.”

Veronika gets a glint in her eye and says, “Maybe we should take a trip to the library and find out. I bet they have books in all kinds of languages. We could try you on them.”

Alina screws up her mouth and looks into the distance like she’s considering the practicalities of this plan. “They probably don’t have books in Tongan. Does that have a written form or is it one of those languages people only speak?”

“Everything has a written form nowadays,” Defne says, strikingly confident; “the missionaries made sure of that.”

“Or just hang around the harbor when the sailors are coming in,” Veronika says. “Or stay here for that matter. Maybe that’s why you became a dancer! Because you have a soulmate from a far-off land and this was what would bring you into the same country!”

“I doubt it,” Minako says, faltering a little. She’s spent her adulthood so far writing off the possibility that she might have a soulmate after all; but then, for a while she didn’t think she would ever land a permanent job with a company. Maybe she’s been giving up too easily, and now that she’s grown up, finally a professional in her chosen field, she can think about possibilities. She doesn’t manage to think of any witty response to Veronika before the break is over and it’s time to get back to work.

After that Minako listens closely when the German dancers find each other for a conversation, or the Italians, to see if she suddenly understands them or knows how to respond. No dice. There’s one Khazakh man in the company and she finds an excuse to stand next to him once during a break in class, turns to him and tries to will herself to speak Khazakh or maybe Russian. As soon as she tries it, her mind emergency-ejects all her knowledge of English, French, and Japanese, so she just blinks at him and runs away in search of her water bottle.

Many of the corps members have only recently paired up, and they divide their attention between the rigors of company life and the needs of a delicate new soulbond. Some lucky ducks are paired with another dancer, or someone attached to the orchestra or playhouse or opera, so they keep comparable hours and understand one another. Others have been inscrutably fated to fall in love with nurses or taxi drivers or bureaucrats. Veronika’s soulmate works in the Ministry of Environment and he doesn’t know anything about ballet, or so he strenuously insists whenever his colleagues are nearby; but, Veronika says, “He cares as much as he knows how. We only met last year. We’re still learning.”

“Lilia Baranovskaya lived in a different city from her soulmate for almost a decade,” Defne says. The four of them have started to form a habitual cluster; Minako is pleased to see that they all not only talk to her, they talk to each other when she is busy with something else. “He was an Olympic figure skater—he didn’t want to leave his coach, she didn’t want to leave the Bolshoi, so they commuted to visit each other on their days off.”

“It’s the ideal marriage!” Alina says, laughing. She’s quick with comments like that, but she goes home to her soulmate every day and is very shy of saying anything about her. Minako suspects she’s acting cynical so she doesn’t get revealed as a romantic.

* * *

Ballet is a global language, but Danish ballet is a particular dialect. It’s firmly committed to preserving its legacy (this is, as all their marketing material constantly reiterates, the third-oldest ballet company in the world) and in particular to the nineteenth-century Bournonville style. It’s quick, light, contained. Minako has to adjust after her six months of hyper-expression with Cason. It’s probably good for her, learning this kind of control. Her velocity and power have always been assets, but she also frightened her teachers sometimes with the way she threw herself into the air like a skydiver. During her long grind of fruitless auditions she suspected that this was one of the things holding her back, the appearance that she was unfettered and uncontrollable, the fear that she was going to hurt herself. She’s getting somewhere now, marrying that power to this delicacy; it makes both of them mean something more. Or so she hopes.

She dances assiduously all autumn and winter, playing some part in every program, occasionally going out with Defne to a small café-bar near the theater where they share cheap wine and pretend they have more in common than they do. Both of them are unmatched but Defne expects to meet her soulmate at any minute and Minako wavers perpetually between hope and resignation. They don’t often talk about this directly. Instead they compare notes on being an expatriate: the food, the language, the way people expect you to represent your home country even if you left it for good reasons. They take turns being the one having a harder time. Minako shivers through the wet Copenhagen winter, which hovers just above freezing most of the time so that the damp can penetrate her apartment walls and chill her through her scarves and gloves, and Defne talks almost fondly of wet winters in London with the RBS. Then Defne hits a slump of missing her family, and Minako tries to the best of her ability to jolly her up, to take her and Veronika and Alina out to museums or the Tivoli Gardens and make them all feel like they have a community here. She watches the figure skating at the winter Olympics in February and drags the rest of them into watching it too. Minako shouts out loud about Midori Ito’s triple-triple combinations, and they all hold their breath watching Silvia Camerlengo & Celestino Cialdini’s intricate lifts and spins in the ice dance competition and agree it’s a crime when they finish off the podium.

It’s not an easy season, but Minako feels as if she knows how to get through it, providing her own light through the long winter nights. Spring comes like a surprise, a sudden break in the clouds, and then in June the northern summer opens up like a flower and the ballet begins its summer layoff. Minako has no rehearsals and performances. Other dancers travel, or teach, or dance at summer festivals and theaters, but Minako makes the most self-indulgent decision of her life and takes the summer off. She promises her mother she’ll come home for a visit next year and then she stays in Copenhagen, joins a gym, keeps up a routine of barre practice, and enrolls in Danish classes. She’s home by nine every evening, watching the twilight come on and listening to the small human sounds in her apartment building.

The days stretch out until they feel effectively endless. It rains a lot but it’s almost always daytime, and on clear days the population spills out onto the sidewalks to drink coffee and eat buttery pastries in the sun. Minako skips the pastries, and her hot drink of choice is still green tea, but on afternoons when she doesn’t have class she’ll indulge in a cup of what Veronika calls “hammer coffee”—“strong enough to dissolve the handle and float the head”—and gets such a powerful caffeine buzz that she’s convinced she has arrived in the most beautiful city in the world. She misses the immersive, enveloping heat of a summer in southern Japan, but there’s salt on the air here, like in Hasetsu, and the people in this city are so grateful every time there’s sun that it feels like they’re all on holiday together.

During the season she had no time to think about food, just nutrition, a basic calculation of what calories and vitamins she needed to keep dancing. Now she has time to cook. The Danes eat a lot of fish, so that’s good: she writes home for advice and learns to make some basic seafood dishes, seasoned with precious mirin and soy sauce and sesame oil bought at an Asian market behind the central train station. She buys small, sweet strawberries from the open-air markets. She starts to think she might have found a home for herself here.

When fall comes, Minako attacks the rehearsals for the new season with a renewed joy and fervor. She feels like she’s constantly swimming upstream, but apparently she’s getting somewhere, because in the fall, thirteen dizzyingly short, agonizingly long months after joining the company, she’s promoted to soloist.

She stays there for seven years.

* * *

It’s the middle of the 1994-95 season, Minako’s seventh as soloist and eighth with the company, when she wakes up one morning wondering if she’s really going to be a soloist, in Denmark of all places, for the rest of her career.

She hates this thought as soon as she sees it coming. She hates considering the possibility of going back out there, taking class with other companies and sleeping in train stations or on airplanes, making another hard decision. And she simultaneously hates the fact that it’s been months since she saw either of her parents and it will be months again before she has another chance.

For the rest of that day—getting dressed, attending class, talking to her colleagues, going around the corner to order tea in Danish, even meeting with the costume department—she makes a game attempt to see Copenhagen like she did in her first summer, as a dear and beautiful city of brightly colored houses and harbor. This company gave her everything. Her friends are here. People know who she is, even; she gets recognized on the streets.

But then, of course she does, because she lives in Copenhagen, the city of one famous children’s writer, one philosopher, and exactly one Japanese woman. (That’s not really true, she reprimands herself; but it might as well be, some days.)

And no one told her, but being a soloist is lonely. She’s not onstage in every performance like when she was in the corps, and of course the principals get the really substantial roles. So she exists in between. Her first promotion came so fast that she thought it would be an easy walk up to principal from there, but it isn’t. She’s starting to doubt whether a promotion is in the cards at all.

And if not, then what? The friends she made in her first year here are still with the company, but they’ve all settled down with their soulmates—including Defne, who found herself matched up with the president of the stagehands’ union and jumped into domestic life faster than anyone expected. Alina has loosened up about her personal life just enough to introduce her wife to her coworkers at galas and holiday parties; Veronika’s fallen into a steady, workable routine with her soulmate, who’s left his old government job for a new government job that Minako can never remember. Minako is the odd one out again.

She’s considered just going out and looking for a hookup. There are people willing to fool around with someone who is unmatched; she was halfheartedly trying for this in Paris, though in retrospect she knows she was mostly playacting. Sleeping with someone outside of a soulmate match is supposedly fine, here in western Europe in the nineties. But it isn’t really. It’s still considered a betrayal if either or both of the parties has a soulmate they haven’t found yet, loathsome if they _have_ found their soulmates and are being unfaithful, a sad if understandable act of making-do for people whose soulmates have died. Those feelings carry over into whatever small consideration people give to those like Minako who have no one to betray. It’s just taboo enough that attempting it feels emotionally dangerous: she might feel attraction, but not enough to go underground with someone, put her reputation on the line, embark on the weird intimacy of a shared transgression. No one would have the right to be angry at her if she took a lover, even a casual lover, but they’d find her somewhat tawdry. It doesn’t feel worth it.

Anyway it’s not as if she needs another physical activity, or more people to touch her; she’s active every day, has people’s hands on her every day. Mostly this is more than enough and she’s relieved to retreat to her little home. But she does need to be around other people sometimes, just to talk, outside of work. Lately she’s been trying to take charge of her social routines so that she doesn’t feel like a third wheel—she likes having people over for her birthday, or at the start of a break in the season. But her apartment looks a little shoddier in her own eyes every time she contemplates having someone else over, and a little less like a place where a thirty-year-old grown woman would live. In Paris she loved the romantic feeling of having a one-bedroom walk-up all to herself, but the starving-artist routine is a lot less cute in midcareer.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s time for a change. Three days after she woke up with that worm in her heart, she asks her friends, her old cohort, over to her apartment for a drink. “Ballerinas only,” she says, feeling a little juvenile as she says it; but she doesn’t know what other excuse to make for not wanting their partners to come, for wanting only the little group they used to be.

Alina kisses her cheek when she arrives, hands over a bag of low-fat crisps, and asks, “Have you been making changes here?”

Minako looks around. “I don’t think so? I cleaned it.”

“Oh, that’s it!” Alina laughs, and they’re back on their sarcastic not-too-close footing again. Minako feels wistful for a moment but then dismisses that feeling; she wanted to get her mind off of her own discontent, not have a heart-to-heart. But then she can’t quite think of anything to say. She offers Alina a glass of wine and they sit there making quiet comments about how the week has been until Veronika breezes in, Defne close behind her, and proposes a new topic of conversation, which Minako is startled to realize is: how are they all feeling about their careers?

“You start,” Minako says, wondering what she has in mind.

Veronika spreads her arms the back of Minako’s loveseat and leans back, crossing her legs at the knee and staring at the ceiling. “Confused!” she announces. “You know I did that choreography residency in London last summer just to try it, and I thought that was that, I didn’t need to pursue it. But I think it’s spoiled me for dance. I am getting very annoyed with following directions. I think I could do better. Which is absurd! I’m twenty-five, I haven’t been injured, I’m dancing well, this is the kind of thing I should be thinking about in ten years.”

Alina nods, thoughtful, and does that thing she does where she stares into the distance with her mouth screwed up, and then she says, “What would you do if you didn’t think it was ridiculous?”

The conversation stays focused on Veronika for a good while without any decisions being made, although she seems glad for a chance to hash it all out. “All right,” she finally says, “we’ve all talked about me long enough. Stop. Someone else go. Minako. How are you feeling?”

Minako feels a little panicked. That’s stupid, so to prove she isn’t panicking, she does the opposite of what a panicked person would do and tells the frank truth: “I’m starting to feel impatient with this company.”

Halfway between having that thought and vocalizing it, it transformed from discontent with Copenhagen itself and with the way she’s been surrounded by white people for the last seven years into a real irritation with the Royal Danish Ballet. She blinks a little and tries it again to see what she says this time. “I don’t think they ever want to promote me.”

“God, I _know_ ,” Defne says out of nowhere. “It’s ridiculous the way they treat you. Everyone in the company can tell you’re one of the best we have. But they keep stuffing you in the background and having you do little things and it’s like they already have their minds made up for no reason whatsoever. God Almighty I don’t know how I’ve never heard you complain before now.”

“Oh,” Minako says, quiet. Then there is a moment she can never afterwards recollect, and when it’s over she is sitting on her floor crying, and her friends are yelling at Defne for making her cry while Defne is yelling at them back for being afraid of the truth and it takes a while before anyone tries to comfort Minako, which they can’t do anyway. She manages to refrain from wailing, but her eyes leak profusely while Veronika runs around looking for a box of tissues.

“How do you not keep these out?” she says, coming out of the bathroom. “I had to dig through your linen closet.”

Minako sniffles a little. “Back home,” she says, not answering the question, “they have covers for tissue boxes. I should ask for one from my mother; I never see those for sale here.”

She must look very sad about the lack of tissue box covers in Copenhagen. “I’ll macramé one for you,” Veronika says, getting down onto the floor with her, “if you care about it that much. What is this really about?”

Minako accepts a tissue, cleans her eyes, leans her head back against the wall and straightens her legs along the floor in front of her. “I don’t know. I was so happy when I got this job, and when I got promoted to soloist. I hate thinking about not wanting to be here anymore. I didn’t even go to a proper school. I should just be grateful I’ve gotten this far.”

“Should is a nice word, but…” Defne starts. Alina glares at her. “What? You two are being very uptight about this and it isn’t helping. Obviously she’s already been thinking about it.”

“I didn’t think I had,” Minako says. “But it’s been…I don’t know. Soloist with this company is a good gig. It isn’t that bad. But I really think I have it in me to do better than this.”

Alina volunteers, timidly, “I know you can do more than you’re doing. You’re such a powerful dancer, Minako. You’re so strong and so expressive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do a role onstage that made proper use of that.”

They sit with that for a little while; Minako doesn’t feel ready to respond. Veronika looks around the room. “From down here,” she comments, “this place looks really empty. Were you ever going to put some art on the walls?”

It’s not the first time someone has commented on the emptiness of her apartment. But Minako never saw it that way. Her food is here, her books, her television, her small movie collection, her clothes for rehearsal and her clothes for after-parties and days off; all of which is to say her laundry is here, and the things she intends to read, and the ballet videos she keeps meaning to go back and study, and the dishes that always need washing. It’s a full apartment. She always figured people must think it’s empty because it’s rare to live alone, at this age; a lot of people have found their soulmate by now.

But Veronika’s right that she’s never put any art on the walls. When she moved in here she thought she was too old for tacking up posters, and she never invested in art with a real frame, so now she has nothing. Not a life, just a headquarters. And here she was supposed to be an artist. She looks up at the ceiling, blinks a few times, and says, “Do we need to keep talking about me or can we discuss how successful Alina is now?”

Alina snorts softly but, mercifully, takes the bait, and when she notices that Minako has finished her wine and is twirling the glass between her palms, she gently takes the glass away and puts it on the coffee table. Minako stays on the floor, thinking vaguely that this would be more comfortable on a tatami mat or a rubberized studio floor than the cold tile of her apartment floors. Alina’s career is going gangbusters and they’re all very proud of her; Defne is optimistic. Minako joined the company later than everyone else in the room, after her jobbing years in Tokyo and her fellowship in Paris, and maybe that’s why she’s impatient. Or maybe there’s no reason. Maybe there’s a timer inside her that’s going off and she’s going to have to decide how to deal with it.

Once they’ve checked in with everyone, they manage to move the conversation to lighter topics: food, music, Alina’s soulmate’s inexplicable sudden interest in bike racing. Defne hangs back when they’re all leaving and puts a hand on Minako’s arm. “If you want to know what they think about you at work, you can always ask,” she says softly. “You have a right to discuss it and not wait for them to tell you things.”

Minako nods, and on the next workday she approaches the head ballet master, a tall Dane named Anders who appears absent-minded but always turns out, when he is giving notes, to have been paying excruciatingly close attention to every dancer in the studio. He agrees to give her a meeting, and she stiffens her spine and goes.

He is very, very diplomatic. He talks about how she performs in partnered work, how she reacts to other dancers onstage, how she dances in romantic roles. It’s not until afterward, when Minako is warming up for the evening performance, that she realizes something is amiss.

“He’s judging me for being alone,” she says out loud to the mirror, and then she suddenly feels so angry that she almost shouts it at the ceiling.

That makes up her mind pretty rapidly. If the ballet master thinks that a person without a soulmate can't be a principal ballerina, if he thinks Minako is too callous or independent or naïve or bloody-minded or any other set of contradictory qualities that mean she can't dance Aurora or Odette, then she has to leave this ballet company. It would be one thing to get stuck at the rank of soloist because she wasn't good enough to be principal; if she really thought that was true, she could probably learn to accept it. But she can't sit still to be rejected because of a stupid prejudice.

So now what?

* * *

Minako is still considering that question when she walks past a coin-operated newspaper stand on the way to class, sees “Japan” in a headline, and stops to see what it’s about. What does _jordskælv_ mean? She can see part of the front-page picture but it’s indistinct, a dark view of a city. She sees the word “Kobe.” She puts a coin in the machine, opens the front to get out a copy of the paper, and unfolds it.

Rubble, emergency crews, people with face masks on.

She starts to walk again but she doesn’t put the paper down, and by the time she gets to the theater and lifts her gaze to say good morning to the employee at the security desk she knows what that wordmust mean.

In the locker room Defne sees Minako holding the newspaper and grimaces, which is probably a kind of sympathy. Minako nods at her and looks for Veronika. She’s in front of her locker sewing ribbons onto her shoes, and when she notices Minako’s shadow falling over her she starts to say “Good morning,” but she stops when she looks up.

“Can you tell me what this says?” Minako asks, waving the newsprint at her forlornly, and Veronika bites her lip and confirms her suspicion. There’s been an earthquake, a level seven earthquake in Hanshin.

“I’m safe,” Minako’s mother tells her when they manage to connect by phone, “your father’s safe, everyone in Hasetsu is safe. A lot of people are talking about going there to help. It’s the worst one since the twenties.”

“Tell me again that you’re okay,” Minako demands, and she can hear her mother breathing a few times over the line before saying, “I’m safe. It wasn’t close to us.”

“It was a lot closer than I am.”

That doesn’t make any sense, but her mother just says again, “I’m okay.”

“She’s okay,” Minako tells Veronika when she comes out of the phone room, and Veronika, who has now witnessed more emotional moments in Minako’s life than Minako had ever intended, says, “That’s good,” and lays a hand on her forearm. They go back to finish getting dressed for class.

Almost no one asks about it. Defne finds her between the dressing room and class to ask if she’s all right and give a perfunctory shoulder pat when Minako says yes. Alina finds her during a break and expresses real concern. That’s it. Minako has never felt so shallowly rooted in this company. All these people know her, know where she’s from, and ought to know the news if they were paying any attention, but—well, they weren’t paying attention, or they didn’t put two and two together, or they don’t care enough to ask.

They’re opening a show on Thursday, and today is Tuesday, so everyone has other things to think about—including Minako, frustratingly. She gets lunch with Defne like usual but zones out during their conversation. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m just a bit—” but then she can’t think of any way to describe her state of mind except “shaken,” which is horribly inappropriate. “Distracted,” she supplies after a moment’s thought, but that doesn’t convey how it seems like something is badly wrong.

On her way home in the late afternoon she finds an actual newsstand with copies of the _International Herald Tribune_ so she can read about the earthquake in English. They don’t have any Japanese papers. She takes the _Tribune_ home and finds herself chanting, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” as she physically throws aside all the pages of the paper that don’t include news about the earthquake, all the coverage of politics and the letters to the editor. All the movie and theater reviews. Everything about the arts.

Her mother had said that people were traveling there to help, and for a wild few minutes Minako thinks she will do that too. But then she gets control of herself. It’s not just that she has commitments here; there’s no way she could help enough to justify the cost of the trip. It would make more sense to donate the price of airfare, but it wouldn’t quiet her nerves. For a moment she wishes she were a Christian so she could make herself feel better by praying for the victims, but there’s no use now in pretending that would do any good.

It’s not until a week later that she has the idea. She could raise funds; she could give a benefit performance and donate the ticket sales to earthquake relief. She could put herself to use.

The idea snowballs rapidly once she shares it with her friends. She adopts the tactic of talking about it in any conversation she gets into, and that way she finds out who to ask about reserving space, who knows someone in the publicity department, who can tell her the stagehand union’s rules about extra work. Someone has a jazz musician friend who might donate some time; someone knows someone who has worked with charities and knows about handling large donations. So word gets around quickly, but she is nevertheless surprised when she gets a phone call from Ishikawa Eiji, a principal danseur in London and one of the few other Japanese ballet dancers working in Europe.

Minako knows who he is, of course, but she’s a little surprised he knows about her. It’s not as if she’s made headlines here, and there’s word going around that he’s busy laying ground for a new company back in Japan. She’s flattered and a little proud when he tells her, “I have been trying to think of a way to help, but you’ve moved much faster than I have. I have some experience directing. Are you only holding the benefit in Copenhagen? You should bring it to London too. There are much larger audiences here. We’d raise more. I can talk to some people.”

He takes charge of a lot of the organization after that. Minako feels irked and grateful at the same time. She had braced herself to do all this work alone, and it’s anticlimactic to have so much help, but she physically couldn’t do everything that this project requires, and she suspects she’s given Ishikawa an outlet for his own shock and worry. She can’t reasonably begrudge him that.

They have a more organized phone call later, when he asks what she has on the docket and whether there’s anything she particularly wants to dance. She goes back and forth with herself a few times before deciding she might as well ask. “I’d like to do Bejart’s _Boléro_.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t know it,” he admits. “That is, I haven’t danced it.”

The Danish ballet doesn’t know it either, but she doesn’t say so. “We can learn it,” she says. “It’s beloved in Japan. It would mean a lot.”

It would mean a lot to _her,_ of course, and maybe she’s being egotistical. But she remembers the ovation that the piece got when she saw it in Tokyo and thinks, _that’s got to mean something_. They don’t need as large a corps as Tokyo had; eight would be enough to make the central dancer look surrounded. She doesn’t bring up the fact that she’s never danced this ballet before, and he doesn’t ask her that directly, just how much prep time she’ll need. As soon as the details are settled she goes into the library at the theater, checks out the tape of Plisetskaya’s performance of the piece, and settles down to study it. It’s taxing, adding this additional practice time to her schedule, but she may never have this opportunity again—either to perform this piece or to rehearse something that means so much—and she’s not going to let it pass her by.

She works herself to her limits, reminds herself that she can’t dance if she’s dead, takes a grim rest day, begins again. Once she knows what she’s doing she passes the tapes around to all the dancers who are taking part and asks them to study it too. “We need all hands on deck,” she says. “Any gender, I don’t care. We’ll all wear black leotards and tights and the audience won’t care either.”

When they have their first rehearsal she’s desperately grateful for the tapes. She’s never tried to teach or direct before, and if this group didn’t already have much of the dance in their heads she doesn’t know how she would ever teach it to them. They look to her trustingly, and she tries her best not to disappoint them.

“Be fiercer,” she tells Defne, who usually gentles her edges onstage. “It’s okay to show your teeth a little.”

“Go slower,” she says to a man from the corps whose name she keeps forgetting. “This has to be very, very patient.”

And they do, and it gets better, and she dances in the center and commands them. She feels herself growing into a job she hadn’t thought of choosing, a role she chose anyway because nobody else was going to do it.

When the night of the performance finally comes it’s a mess and a trial and a joy, no one backstage feeling quite prepared, everyone putting on brave professional faces when they go onstage. Everyone onstage keeps referring to the earthquake, and Minako feels a little panicked remembering how it felt to stare at that Danish newspaper trying to make out what it said, to wait for her mother to pick up the phone and say she was all right. She looks desperately around her at all the people who have shown up to help and tries to take comfort in it, but that seems premature, like she’s trying to move on from a grief before she’s felt it. There’s a cellist onstage playing some very restrained and elegant Bach thing and she’s in danger of breaking into tears as if it were the climax of _Romeo and Juliet_. She’s up next. It would be better not to cry through her own performance.

She thinks back to the first time she saw this ballet in Tokyo, and tries to school her face: serious, authoritative, powerful. She gets halfway there but strongly suspects that there’s still visible grief on her face, and exhaustion from throwing herself into this enormous endeavor right after a taxing full season of dancing. She breathes in and thinks of Noé in Paris asking, _how does it feel in your body?_

It feels heavy. It feels unsettled in her limbs, quick in her heartbeat. She lifts her arms from the elbows and notices how she wants to curl her hands in protectively toward her chest; she turns her palms outward instead, as if pushing someone away. She thinks, _I can work with this_.

And she does. Whether the ballet looks sorrowful to anyone else, or triumphant, or whatever she thought she wanted to be, it’s difficult to say; but she gives it absolutely everything she can, almost twenty minutes of ceaseless churning motion, raising her unmarked arms over her head again and again until the company is closing in around her at the climax and she knocks them down and then stares at their bodies on the stage as if thinking, _what on earth have I done_. The ovation is immediate and long. She feels like she’s broken through something to the other side.

* * *

Minako barely has time to bow to her audience and wonder whether the applause is full of admiration or pity, to shake the hands of the attendees and avoid their questions about why she cast _Boléro_ with a mixed-gender corps and what it means, to nod through a rushed conversation with the head of box office about how much money they brought in and how it will be handled, before she’s off to do it all again in London.

She doesn’t know London well, has only visited once for an unsuccessful audition. It’s so much larger than Copenhagen, and so medievally winding and disorganized, that she shrinks away a bit from spending any time out in the city and chooses instead to stay mostly in the theater, rehearsing all over again. Some of the participants from the Copenhagen show have come over and some haven’t, so they have to learn _Boléro_ over again with the new company. It’s the most multiracial group of ballet dancers she can remember seeing; Ishikawa has rounded up most of the Japanese dancers in Europe, plus a significant number of Ishikawa’s colleagues from the Royal. It seems likely that everybody else here could have danced the lead in this ballet at least as capably as Minako could, but there’s no going back now. If Ishikawa notices that she’s new at this he doesn’t say anything about it. He has a lot of other things to think about too—he’s running this whole show and has to wrangle contracts, ticket pricing, publicity; even work that he isn’t directly doing seems to need his input every day, and they only have a short time together. They hardly talk except to establish schedules and make plans.

The Royal Opera House in London is larger, the audience is louder, the whole show feels like a bigger deal than anything she’s done in Denmark. Minako isn’t sure how to feel about that. She doesn’t know how she feels about anything. She corrals her emotions as best she can and goes onstage for _Boléro_ relying on a kind of muscle memory, thinking of how it went the first time, and one way or another that seems to work. It seems like she’s done all right.

Still, she’s completely unprepared when Ishikawa finds her at the reception afterward and offers her a job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Silvia Camerlengo, Celestino's partner, is named after Pasquale Camerlengo. I suspect this guy was the model for Celestino in the first place—at least, he's an Italian ice dancer who now teaches and choreographs at the Detroit Skating Club. Celestino & Silvia finish in fifth at the Olympics because that's what Calegari & Camerlengo historically did in 1992. Sorry, fictional characters, but fifth at the Olympics is still very good.
> 
> The Maya Plisetskaya performance of _Boléro_ with the Ballet du XXème Siècle, which Minako studies on tape in this chapter, is well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsSALaDJuN4
> 
> “Hammer coffee” is something a former teacher at my high school used to talk about. I can't independently confirm whether the Danes ever use an expression like that, but they do drink a lot of coffee—they're ranked fourth in the world in per-capita coffee consumption. Just so you know.
> 
> During the brief period when I considered naming all the chapters in this fic after poems, before I decided that was too precious, this chapter was going to get a title from “At Twenty-Eight” by Amy Fleury. I still have a fondness for that one; it can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48490/at-twenty-eight


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adaptation, achievement, attitude, and this is going to be the real deal.

Tokyo is an enormous city.

This isn’t news. Minako has lived here before. Still, it’s strange to be back. At first it’s a relief to relax the part of her brain that helped her manage in English at work, that picked out the Danish words she knew in signs and menus. But hearing her first language all the time quickly becomes exhausting. Every time she hears someone greet another person in Japanese she has an impulse to turn around and see if they’re talking to her. And the city has changed: a café where she used to go as a student has been replaced by an Italian restaurant, as she determines after walking past the place three times and thinking she simply missed it. The street fashions have advanced by eight years and she can’t read them so easily anymore, determine who belongs to what group and what message they’re trying to send. The cheap neighborhoods are becoming trendy, and the trendy neighborhoods are becoming expensive and a little stodgy. In the years she’s been gone Minako has seen only a few Japanese movies, and no TV shows; now the city is plastered with advertisements for sequels and second seasons to beloved franchises she’s never heard of.

Minako knew, of course, that her mother had moved back to Hasetsu, but when she imagined returning to Tokyo she couldn’t help imagining her mother there, too, and the apartment that they used to share. Instead she’s on her own again. She’s left her teachers, her partners, her colleagues, her friends, and now it’s just her. Her and the brand-new ballet company that Ishikawa is starting.

She has a little bit of time before classes and rehearsals start, a grace period for settling in. She spends some time buying kitchen appliances, unpacking her boxes, setting up utility accounts, all the finicky tasks that go with moving countries. But she also spends a lot of time simply being in the city. She gets on the subway and rides it during rush hour, remembering what it’s like to be pressed in with this many bodies, and then she rides it in the daytime, when the office workers are all at their desks and the train is occupied by retirees, shift workers, children on summer break. She spends time in the parks and she gets reacquainted with Tokyo street food. (She admires but refrains from most of the fried offerings, and she controls her desire to buy every product containing red bean paste, but she is happier than she expected to be eating onigiri again, and shaved ice, and yakitori.) She outfits her apartment with a proper tea-making kit and a large canister of green tea, which is sold in good quantities here like the staple it is, and not as an exoticism parceled out in small doses. She buys some new clothes that she might or might not have needed, just to enjoy how easy it is to find her size.

She’s a little lonely, and a part of her worries that she’s trying to re-plant herself in a pot she already outgrew, but all of these things help to assure her that it’s going to be possible, that she’s making a good move. Two weeks after her arrival she attends her first company class at the Ishikawa Ballet, and her new life starts to make sense.

* * *

“A city of eight million people has room for more than the Tokyo Ballet,” Ishikawa Eiji said back in London. “I’m planning to dance and direct, both. I want to do contemporary works, commission choreographers, get something really new started. Are you in?”

It was the voice of her ambition, more than her own, that said, “In as a principal dancer?”

“It depends on the makeup of the company, but—”

“I’m interested, but not if the only reason you want me is that I won’t need a work visa. I have a soloist contract at the third-oldest company in the world”—she couldn’t believe she was repeating that line—“and I’m not interested in taking the same position in a smaller, newer company. We’re talking about a principal position or none at all.”

She’s always been a plain speaker but she amazed herself that day. It must have been something about the benefit show, something about the terrific boldness she had to assume to put the whole thing together and harness her emotions to dance in it.

“Fine. I’m not ready to talk numbers yet, but we can agree that it’s for a principal job.”

“Good. Now forgive me for asking, but do you know what you are doing, and is it worth giving up my contract, or is this a vanity project?”

“Forgiven,” Ishikawa said, and he laid out the details as they exist so far. He’s already incorporated the new company, which is named after himself, and he’s figured out a fair bit of funding. He knows where he wants to rent rehearsal space and has his eye on a few different performance venues. Some foreign dancers and a choreographer are interested in coming over for gigs. This is, or is going to be, the real deal.

Minako was clear that she didn’t want to be a big fish in their little pond. She needs to be surrounded by dancers she can learn from. Ishikawa has lived up to his end of that deal. The dancers he’s hired, though they’re mostly younger than her, are an impressive bunch, disciplined in small things and conspicuously talented in large ones. Ishikawa dances with them as he directs class and the company members keep slipping up in their forms of address, unsure whether to talk to him as an employer or a teacher or a senior colleague.

Their first production as a company is going to be Balanchine’s _Jewels_. It’s a calculated choice in a lot of ways: an abstract twentieth-century work but solidly part of the canon, an American ballet that’s never been performed in Japan and shows off multiple styles of dancing. The goal is to pitch the Ishikawa Ballet to the public as high-level professionals, real competitors to the Tokyo Ballet, while making clear that they’re not going to retread the same ground; and it won’t hurt if they can literally dazzle some audiences with the flash of jewel-toned costumes. This production is discreetly cutting some corners—the corps isn’t as large as when New York City Ballet does it—but it’s still staking a claim.

The ballet comprises three pieces set to music by different composers: _Diamonds_ to Tchaikovsky, _Emeralds_ to Fauré, _Rubies_ to Stravinsky. Each section is danced in a different style, and all the dancers are aware that what they do in this show will affect what they’re chosen to do in the future. Minako is in a good position, dancing the Tall Girl in _Rubies_ and a smaller role in _Emeralds_ on alternate nights of the run. This suits her very well. _Emeralds_ is like being back with the Royal Danish Ballet; it’s Romantic and graceful and profoundly pretty. _Rubies_ , meanwhile, is a role she can only assume she was given because Ishikawa watched what she did in _Boléro_. It’s faster than the other pieces, more angular, more conspicuously a twentieth-century piece, and she gets to show some attitude. She’s never been as interested in the stately Russian-style dancing showed off in _Diamonds,_ and she frankly thinks that while the lead ballerina in that section might get her picture printed on the posters—she looks exactly like a music-box ballerina, doing prolonged arabesques in a stiff white tutu—it’s the kind of thing that casual viewers will watch once to confirm what ballet looks like, and then they won’t feel compelled to return.

They’re midway through the rehearsal period for the ballet when a woman starts showing up at rehearsals and parking herself on the floor to watch. She doesn’t talk to anybody and she doesn’t show any particular reaction to the dancing. Minako thinks she must be a designer or something, somebody involved in the production whom she hasn’t met yet, and when they have a break she goes over and introduces herself.

“Aoyama Reina,” says the woman with a small bow. “I’m Eiji’s soulmate.” Minako bows back and looks around for Ishikawa. He’s across the room talking to some other dancers; he glances in their direction and nods but doesn’t come over.

They have a short conversation about Reina’s career—she’s a curator at one of the university museums—but Minako is distracted by thinking that for some reason she thought Ishikawa’s soulmate was a foreigner. Why was that? Was she making assumptions, based on something about him or someone he reminded her of?

It’s not until later, after she’s at home for the evening, that she realizes: she didn’t make that assumption on her own, she actually read it somewhere. He had a partner when he lived in London, someone with some non-Japanese name she can’t recall. Minako can’t think how to ask him about it, so she doesn’t.

 _Jewels_ is a beast of a show for a new company to put on. They’re still learning how they work with one another, still getting their legs under them as a company, and this ballet is a hell of a lot of work for anybody. It needs to be worth it. They do some publicity events and Minako sends newspaper clippings home to her mother out of nostalgia. Her father calls to say he heard her on the radio and ask how it’s going. It’s good, she tells him. Hard, but good. She’s optimistic.

It’s justified. The show opens, not without a certain measure of panic, but when it’s really crunch time everybody does what they need to do. Minako dances in _Rubies_ on opening night, flashes her Noé Cason smile and makes herself joyful, sarcastic, daring. She thinks, _Now I am getting somewhere_.

The crowd is a respectable one—Eiji is good at publicity, and at calling in his contacts. At the reception afterward Minako mingles a bit, introducing herself to people from the ballet world and some people from outside it, journalists and artistic types and dedicated fans. Reina is there; she gives Minako a nod and a generic compliment and then goes to find Ishikawa, who’s in the middle of a conversation. Minako hears him say, showily, “My soulmate and I are so happy to have the well wishes of so many in the dance community!”

She overhears that line a couple more times in the evening. _My soulmate and I, my soulmate and I._ It almost feels like a dig, somehow.

Well, never mind them. Minako was magnificent tonight, if she says so herself. She asks the bartender at concessions for a sparkling lemonade in a champagne flute, and she nurses it through the reception, pretending to be tipsily charming when really she’s just charming. She’s vivacious, interesting, demurely flirtatious, sharing stories about her time abroad but making a show of refraining from gossip. She never felt able to hold court like this at a party in Europe. She’s actually made it. She’s really one of the stars here.

Her old teacher is here, too. “Minako,” Imai-sensei says. “You should be very proud. I know I am.”

“Really?” Minako says, and she winces a little at how young she sounds.

“Of course,” Imai-sensei says. “It looks like those lessons in Paris paid off, hm? You’re so much more expressive than you used to be. No one could look away from you.”

“Oh,” Minako says, helplessly pleased.

A couple people say they’re eager to see what the Ishikawa Ballet does next, so they’re bound to sell at least a few tickets to the rest of their shows this season. Both of Minako’s parents are coming later this week to see the show, which is remarkable both because of the distance from Hasetsu and because they haven’t always been good at traveling together. When the party is over, Minako sets her champagne flute softly down on a tray, wraps her shawl closely around her shoulders, and stands there a moment memorizing what this feels like.

How does success feel in her body? It isn’t really an emotion. But the restlessness that always used to dog her, the need to get up to the next level, has quieted down for a moment, and in its place is a certain warmth. She flutters her fingers a little, rocks her head back to smile at the painted lobby ceiling. It’s brighter than contentment. Quicker. Fizzy like the lemonade.

* * *

When they finish _Jewels_ they’re on to rehearsals for the next show, set to a Britten piece and choreographed by Ishikawa himself, and Minako is to dance a significant pas de deux with him. She digs into the process like she always has, working hard, thinking hard, taking pride in being consulted on how this should go and having opinions to offer on the subject. She stops calling him Ishikawa-sama and switches to Eiji-san. His choreography is complicated to learn, all the more so for being brand new, and they need a lot of rehearsal time.

Reina often shows up at break time to take Eiji to lunch, sometimes making awkward small talk with Minako while Eiji runs off to make a phone call or something. Minako finally gives in to her curiosity and asks her, “And were you ever in London, or have you been living in Tokyo?”

Reina pauses a moment and says, “No, I’ve been here. We both decided to do what made sense for our own careers for a number of years.”

“Oh,” Minako says, still wondering about the European whose name used to appear alongside Eiji’s, but she can’t think of any way to continue the conversation except to say something about her own move back, and how the public transit here has taken some reacclimatization, and she doesn’t learn any more about that situation that day.

She does the very next day, though, when she goes in search of dirt. Some of the other principals have known Eiji since London; maybe they know what’s going on. She tries one of them during a break in rehearsal, a younger European woman who came to Japan for this company. Minako sidles up to her in a companionable way, throws off a comment about how she’s feeling about the rehearsal, and then says, “So. I have a question.”

The woman raises her eyebrows.

“Do you think Eiji and Reina are really soulmates?”

“What?” She jolts a little. “Why would you ask that?”

“I just want to know what you think. Isn’t there something fishy there?”

“I mean, a little, but...” She looks over her shoulder, lets out a puff of breath. “I think they’re just weird. They’ve been weird a long time. I don’t think they’re faking it, though. Just playing up the happy-families image.”

“Uh huh,” Minako says. “Didn’t he make his name while they were living on separate continents? Wasn’t there someone else, in London?”

“Well.” She chews her lip a little. “It’s possible they’re a non-romantic pairing.”

“Interesting.” Minako thinks for a moment. “So they did the bohemian living apart thing, maybe got together with other people, and now they’re trying to clean up their act.”

“Well, maybe. I might be speaking out of turn. I’ve known platonic soulmate pairs and they don’t move countries over it. It’s possible they’re just an awkward match and they have no idea what they’re doing.”

The way he talks about her, though—you’d think the man lived under the thumb of a full-time nanny. During an anodyne mid-rehearsal conversation about how tired everyone is, Eiji interjects that his soulmate tells him when to wake up, and he waits for a response but nobody gratifies him with one. She controls the temperature in their apartment, he says; they own a car but she’s the one who drives it. None of these things sound outrageous to Minako, although she privately agrees that it would be a little annoying to consult somebody else about all those domestic details. She tries to listen, to find some way through these conversations that’s productive or at least not corrosive to their working relationship. It’s not hugely annoying, but it’s slightly annoying all the time, and sometimes she thinks that’s worse. There’s the day, for example, when Reina leaves after they have lunch together and Eiji says, “Thank goodness!” as he starts rehearsal with Minako. She stares, comes up short, and goes on dancing. It’s like that a lot, as if he thinks he’s building camaraderie by acting irritated with Reina or putting her down, in ways that are so small they’re hard to respond to.

“Why are we talking about her at all?” Minako finally blurts out. They’re at the exit of the building where they rent studio space, and it’s raining heavily outside. Eiji is waiting for Reina to pick him up, and Minako is waiting for the rain to slack off, or at least stop blowing around so violently, before she hazards her umbrella against the storm.

Eiji, apparently caught off guard, blinks at her and doesn’t say anything, so Minako has an opening to say, “She’s driving through Tokyo traffic in the rain so you don’t have to get wet. I don’t really want to hear about how you won’t want to talk to her when she gets here.”

“Just making conversation,” Eiji says a little indistinctly, half to her and half into the collar of his coat.

“Well, let’s talk about something else. Have you been watching baseball lately?”

“Um. No.” It’s the off season, but he doesn’t mention that.

“Me neither! Let’s talk about our respective decisions not to watch baseball!”

She is rescued from following up on this gambit when Reina’s car pulls up, and Eiji gives her a confused look and leaves without saying anything else.

This conversation only halfway works. Eiji just barely cuts back on the offhand remarks about his soulmate, but now he follows them up with, “I know, I know,” and Minako is spared coming up with a reply or change of subject. She tries to be content to leave the whole situation alone, to tell herself that she has no idea what it’s really like in that relationship and let that be the end of it, even if the whole thing still irritates her more than it should.

* * *

Meanwhile they move on with the work of the company. The Britten show is complicated and utterly new. The woman in charge of costumes, who might get to be costume mistress in the future but for now is basically a freelancer, announces that they blew a large chunk of their money for the season on _Jewels_ (“we didn’t blow it, it was a strategic investment,” Eiji says, but he doesn’t seem bothered either way) and they shouldn’t expect anything so fancy for the next couple of shows. A lot of bold simplicity, a bit of making do.

Minako is surprised, a week into rehearsals on the new show, to get a phone call from Imai-sensei, to hear her say, “If you have some time off from rehearsal and you can stand to spend it in a studio, I’d like to have you visit one of my classes.”

Minako’s prepared for starry-eyed children, but when she gets there and watches Imai-sensei put them through their paces they turn out to be a serious, high-level group. Some of them flick their eyes over in her direction, but none of them say anything until the barre exercises are over. They gather in the center of the room and Imai-sensei gives an overview of what they will be working on that day, and only then does she introduce Minako and invite her to talk about her career.

It’s not the best story right now. She’s just upended herself into a brand-new company with no certain future, and she isn’t sure what to say to make herself sound like a success. But never mind: these students are here for class, not for a reception. Minako dispenses with her introduction as quickly as she can and then asks if they have any questions.

“How do you find a job?” someone asks immediately.

She doesn’t want to give platitudes. “Study English,” she says, after a moment’s thought. “Don’t get too attached to staying in Japan. Get as many auditions as you can. Don’t wait for permission.”

Someone else asks, more shyly, “What is it like to have a dance made for you?”

“I’m just finding out,” she says. “I’m new to being a principal, so no one has ever choreographed something new for me before. It’s frightening, but in a good way. I recommend it.”

They laugh at that. Another student asks about how she does fouettés, so she gets into the center of the room and shows them: “I pull up _now,_ ” and “you have to draw in your arms in _here_ to get speed,” and they seem to like that. She answers a few more questions, and then they have to do their exercises in the center but she agrees to stay and practice with them so they can watch. They’re enchanted by this. Minako can’t remember a time a stranger was so happy to be in the same room with her, let alone a dozen strangers.

She leaves with an open invitation to come back, as soon as her schedule will allow.

The Britten ballet is a success; best of all, Minako is a terrific success in it, getting almost as many inches in the newspaper reviews as are dedicated to the new choreography and concept of the ballet. She holds tight to this triumph when Eiji kicks up the velocity of their rehearsals yet again.

* * *

A year after moving to Tokyo, Minako finds herself back in Denmark, participating in the Copenhagen Summer Dance open-air event with some of her former colleagues. When she comes into the studio for the first day of rehearsal, still jet-lagged and feeling a little dim, she feels something crash into her and a voice yelling her name right into her ear and she’s startled to realize it’s Veronika.

“I didn’t know you were going to be here!” Veronika cries when she pulls back, putting her hands on Minako’s shoulders like an older relative inspecting how much a child has grown.

“I’m sorry,” Minako says. “I meant to call, but the time difference…”

“You could have sent a postcard! Or you could buy a computer, you know. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, you’re busy being prima in a brand new company. I don’t blame you.”

Veronika probably does blame her a little, and Minako is embarrassed, because it’s justified. She might not have a home computer but she did sign up for an email address not too long ago, and she can hardly claim there’s nowhere in Tokyo to go online. Really the reason she didn’t contact Veronika is that it didn’t seem important; she assumed all her friends here were settled in with their soulmates and their careers. And she used to think of Defne as _her_ friend, the one she would turn to for a one-to-one conversation, and others as _their_ friends, good in a crowd but not people she expected to lean on as individuals. She never expected Veronika to miss her this much.

Still, “It’s very good to see you,” she says, stilted but sincere. At the break she lets herself be talked into going out for lunch together at a little shop that serves enormous salads, where she finds herself spilling the whole story about Eiji and his whining and how Reina hangs around anyway and the two of them plaster on smiles for the public all the time.

“What do you think?” she asks. “Are they putting on a show? Should _I_ be putting on a show? Is this respectability thing going to be a problem?” She wasn’t planning on asking for advice, but then, she wasn’t planning on having this conversation at all.

Veronika wrinkles her nose. “Putting on a show sounds awful. Do people really expect you to do that? I thought Japanese people were discreet about that kind of thing.”

“Yes and no.” Minako tries to stab a cherry tomato with her fork and it rolls away from her. It’s been a while since she experienced the frustration of eating round things with a fork; for a moment she almost feels nostalgic, then she chases the tomato down and crushes it in her attempt to stab it again. When she puts it in her mouth it’s sour. People ask her sometimes if she misses Western food, but at the moment she can’t think why. “I mean it would be indecent to ask them personal questions, but it matters that your soulmate _exists_. It makes a difference to how people see you. I think some people consider me childish.”

“Wait, they do? Have they said so?”

Veronika looks rather innocent and Minako blinks at her. “They wouldn’t _say_ so. That isn’t how it works, at least not back home. But everybody’s got opinions, and I can guess what they think about me.”

“Sure, you can guess, but you might be guessing wrong. Anyway are you actually considering pretending to have a soulmate?”

“I wasn’t! But the way people talk about those two, the way he shows her off, it makes me worry. I don’t have a lot of chances, you know. If my career fails that’s it, the end.”

“Yes, but…Minako, that’s true for all of us. We’re all just dancing until we get injured or sick or something. Is that how you’d want to spend your career, going around telling lies about your personal life? It seems to me you were always okay telling people to keep their noses out of your business.” She smiles a little wryly. “You told me enough times.”

Minako’s struck by this. Veronika seems genuinely sad, looking down now and chewing on the insides of her lips while she turns her water glass around and around on the table, but then she shakes herself a little. “I’m sorry,” she says, “you were trying to ask for advice, weren’t you?”

“I was,” Minako says, “but it was probably a bad idea. Just feeling peeved and trying to get an outside read on why. Veronika, you know…I can be rude sometimes, without meaning it. Especially in English. I didn’t mean to shove you away.”

“Ah, well.” She’s trying to laugh it off but not quite succeeding.

“I was always glad we were friends.”

“Well. Me too. It’s good to see you. Eat your salad.”

She has three weeks in Copenhagen to not think about home—three weeks of remembering everything she does and doesn’t miss about this city, and of catching up with Veronika and having rushed coffees with Defne and Alina and promising she’ll try harder to keep in touch—and then it’s another long travel day, and she’s back in Tokyo with autumn approaching.

* * *

It’s a good year.

Eiji is creating a lot of their ballets himself but he’s brought some people on to help, a choreographer from New York, a composer from Germany, people he knows from his days in London. Minako is stronger and faster than she’s ever been, more sure, more expressive; when she leaps attains a new kind of altitude. A well-meaning interviewer asks her what has inspired her improvements since joining the Ishikawa Ballet and she has no good answer—just work, and a certainty that this is her time. Mostly work. She’s hard at it both in and out of the studio; when they prepare to perform _Jardin aux Lilas_ she practices diligently and then goes home to read poetry about gardens, wandering into art galleries on her off days to look for pictures of lilacs.

It’s hard to say for sure, but Minako is starting to get the impression that she’s actually famous. When she goes back to Imai-sensei’s studio in the middle of her second season, one of the students shrieks, “It’s so amazing to meet you! You’re the greatest ballet dancer in Japan!” Minako accepts the enthusiasm but discards the compliment.

Her second summer, Minako takes every opportunity for guest dancing that comes her way, and they start to add up. Small gigs like a festival in Fukuoka that takes her close to home, so her family can come watch; much bigger ones like a spot with the Royal in London, or a dizzying few weeks at the Bolshoi watching Lilia Baranovskaya, still incredible in her late forties, dominate the stage. Minako revises her former opinions about finding Russian ballet too stiff. Alina makes it to one of those performances and they spend a day being tourists in Moscow together, stopping every once in a while to remind each other of something Lilia accomplished onstage. Veronika has started doing more choreography, and when Minako gets home to Tokyo she finds postcards there from Veronika’s gigs in Cardiff and Brussels. She brings little treats from abroad to give the other dancers at her first day back in company class.

Eiji has stayed in Tokyo all summer, taking meetings and making phone calls and juggling funding, because in the Ishikawa Ballet’s third season, after years of saving up while dancing leotard ballets on bare stages, he has a Project with a capital P.

* * *

> **Ishikawa Ballet Spreads Its Wings in _Swan Lake_**  
>  **1997-10-04 Saturday**  
>  _The Ishikawa’s new_ Swan Lake _is daringly Japanese. Rothbart (danced by creative director Ishikawa Eiji), once a magician with mysterious motives, here becomes a political climber in a feudal household, with Siegfried (Kagabu Kaito) as a daimyo’s son who needs to make a strategic marriage for his family’s sake but sentimentally hopes to hold out for his soulmate. It is difficult to dance about politics, and the first act sometimes gets bogged down in the attempt to communicate details that might best have been left out. But once Act II begins, and the young hero finds his soulmate in the most unlikely place, the ballet finds its center. Miss Okukawa Minako’s performance as Odette and Odile is the hinge on which the whole show turns. She is a tragic figure who still convinces us to hope for a happy ending, showing a bewitching joy on finding the love that she hopes will save her. … Odette might meet her inevitable fate at the end of this ballet, but with Okukawa on the stage we have reason to look forward to a golden age of Japanese ballet._

Minako goes out to buy a paper the morning after opening night, and she reads the whole review while standing on the sidewalk, her back pressed against the side of a building so the commuters can get by her. She can’t stop reading the last sentence over again. A golden age of Japanese ballet. A golden age of Japanese ballet. _How does it feel in your body?_ asks a familiar voice in her head, and she breathes in deep to find the answer. It feels like a balloon in her chest, like her eyes are tight with—oh. It feels like crying. She gives herself five undisciplined moments on the sidewalk to hide her face with her newspaper and weep.

When she gets to class Eiji looks stressed. “Good work last night,” he says. “I hope nobody went out celebrating.” And that’s it, and they begin their barre exercises.

The review didn’t say much about his dancing. He can hardly feel left out—the whole production was his baby. But he looks exhausted and a little sad, and not at all like someone who might have cried with happiness earlier this morning. Minako stops on the way out of class while he’s hanging back and looking at something in his planner. “Good show last night,” she says. “Really. It’s amazing what you’ve accomplished. You should be proud.”

He gives her a level look. “Thanks.” He taps his pencil against his planner and looks her up and down. “You should be proud too. Miss Golden Age.”

She blushes, and wonders whether this was a good idea. “I am,” she says simply. “Thank you for the opportunity.”

* * *

It’s strange, dancing Odile, the black swan, who counterfeits her mark to steal away Odette’s soulmate and causes horrible destruction for everyone. “The world thinks I could be like this,” she says one day out loud, to her dressing room mirror, as she puts on her Act III makeup. It’s a frightening thought, but a part of her relishes the sheer destructive glory of it, enjoying onstage a state of being that she never dares go near at any other time.

* * *

A month later Eiji and Minako are in a radio interview together, and the interviewer refers to “the Okukawa—I’m sorry, the Ishikawa Ballet.” Eiji smiles thinly and answers the next question with a rambling discourse about his entire life and career, and Minako can’t get a word in edgewise for the rest of the interview.

The company does an evening of short ballets after that and Eiji doesn’t give Minako any parts at all, saying that nothing was suitable for her. She shrugs and takes a guesting gig in Korea, comes home with a handful of business cards from dancers and directors and musicians, to find that the Ishikawa’s ticket sales fell fifteen percent with her gone.

* * *

A year later she wins the Prix Benois.

_How does it feel in your body?_

Like knowing, like arriving, like joy.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hasetsu, home, and Hiroko’s little boy.

When it comes, the decision to retire is easier than she expected.

Minako has been thinking about this indirectly, casting grudging fearful thoughts in its direction, ever since she decided to go for a professional ballet career. She sometimes imagined a horrible on-stage injury, or some kind of obvious professional dwindling, with her director refusing to give her good parts and Minako tearfully pleading for at least a solo.

But she’s still at the top of her game. “You’re the heart of this company,” a fan tells her at the stage door. “What if we put someone other than Miss Okukawa on the poster?” asks the marketing director, with a wink, and even then she still goes on the front of the season brochures. “We might not have seen your best work yet,” says Imai-sensei, trying to be encouraging.

She’s thirty-eight, still dancing well and more famous than she’s ever been. Still, a lot of signs are pointing in the same direction. There haven’t been any catastrophic injuries, but the little ones are adding up: a weak ankle, a bad knee, tendons having problems in places she doesn’t remember hurting herself. The pain that she’s lived with since adolescence is maturing into a pain that slows her down. She takes supplements; she goes to the physical therapist and the massage provider; she listens to her joints crackling and wonders at what point the sound will be audible to her audiences. And she’s tired, spending less and less of her off days going to movies or writing to her friends or visiting her favorite parts of the city and more lying in hot baths. She slides down in the water, stares at the ceiling, and tries to figure out what it is she’s waiting for. For thirty years she’s spent most of her time waiting for the chance to get onstage; but now, with her time threatening to run out, she feels as if even during shows she’s waiting for something else to happen, like some train is coming to collect her and she doesn’t know when.

Can she really be thinking about leaving? Where will she go?

During the mid-season break in her ninth season with the Ishikawa Ballet, she makes a trip home, where she soaks in a proper onsen and talks to her mother about how she’s feeling. Minako’s mother has always been realistic: “I’m probably retiring in three years,” she says, “so if you want to beat me to the punch you had better act fast.”

“What would I _do_?” Minako whines, resting her head on her arms on the side of the pool. “I only know the one thing.”

“That’s not really true,” her mother says. “You speak good English, you teach sometimes, you have friends all over the world, you know a ridiculous amount about music.”

Minako snorts. “Teaching sometimes isn’t that impressive—it’s just an occasional guest lesson.”

“Everyone starts somewhere. You could teach in your company, even. Have you thought about that?”

“I talked to Ishikawa about it.” She turns to rest her back against the stone and looks over at her mother. “Or, I brought it up. Kind of. But he doesn’t want me to.”

“Did he actually say that?”

“Oh, mama, what hasn’t he said? His ego still can’t handle me. He made some comment about how a ballet master has to think about everyone and not just himself, and it was all I could do not to strangle him. Like he didn’t name the whole company after himself! I’m so tired of him, honestly. Anyway I think he’s still sore about the, you know. The soulmate thing.”

He and Reina are still playing happy-soulmates for the public, despite the fact that everyone notices how put-on it is, how they cling in public and spring apart in smaller groups. It’s too boring to be scandalous, and nobody really cares about it anymore. She’s glad she didn’t get scared into making up a fake soulmate or something, back when she was worried about what people thought of her. Too much work by far. Those two should drop the act and give each other some space.

But they didn’t ask her opinion, like usual. Just posed her in place, the tragically unmatched ballerina, and pretended she hadn’t exceeded Eiji’s accomplishments three times over: guested at all the major companies in Europe, done her own off-season tour in America, taught master classes in Korea and India and the Philippines that strengthened the connections within the Asian ballet community. No wonder she’s tired.

“Well,” her mother says, “you’d better make up your mind quick. Even a star can’t afford to live in Tokyo for long without a job.”

“No,” Minako says, closing her eyes. She takes a breath, a second, a third, and says, “I’m thinking of moving back here.”

There’s a silence, and Minako holds still for it, doesn’t open her eyes until a minute has passed and she finally cracks. It’s hard to be composed about her mama. She forgets that, but it’s one of the reasons she likes coming home.

“I’m okay, you know,” her mother says. She’s looking down at the water and seems a little embarrassed. “I’m not old yet, and I see your father a few times a week, so it’s not like—”

“Oh, I wasn’t—I mean.” Minako blushes because of course she _was_ thinking that it would be good to be closer to her parents when they came to need her, and that they would need her more because of their rocky relationship with one another. “I know you’re not old—probably your joints are in better shape than mine. But I think it would be better. I’m not going into retreat or anything, but I need a home base. I’d like it to be at home.”

“Hmm.” Her mother abruptly gets out of the water and gets her towel. “Let’s get a coffee. The onsen is fine for imagining things but you need to think practically.”

“I am thinking practically!” Minako objects, but she lets herself be helped out of the water, and when they are both dressed they sit at a table in the onsen’s café and talk about teaching. Minako has plenty of friends and contacts at the studios and ballet schools, and any of them could get her a job. But if she wants, as she thinks she does, to stop asking anyone else for things and hang out her own shingle, then she’d better do it somewhere cheaper than Tokyo.

“You could move to Fukuoka or Saga, if you want to be closer to home,” her mother says. “You’d probably get more students there.”

“Sure, but I don’t know anyone there. I’m tired of starting over in a new place. I’d rather start over somewhere familiar.”

“Hasetsu’s changed, you know. It’s not like you can pick up where you left off when you were thirteen.”

“No, of course not. But everywhere else is changing too.”

“Okay.” Her mother seems happier about this plan now that she’s convinced it isn’t all about her. “If you really want to, I’ll help you figure it out. It would be good to have you home.”

* * *

Minako’s last performance with the Ishikawa Ballet is beautiful, and the curtain call is filled with roses. By the third time Eiji cracks a joke about getting rid of his biggest competition, she’s simultaneously so happy to be leaving and so heartbroken to be retiring that she could cry. She doesn’t. She acts humbled and grateful and honored instead, bowing and shaking hands and flinging her arms at the company and the orchestra pit to direct the applause in their direction and then taking another bow.

She takes a whole month to rest, pack up her apartment, and say goodbye to important people individually, and she carries herself through the whole process like the professional she is. When she boards her flight to Fukuoka she impulsively orders a vodka tonic from the flight attendant and finally lets go of her relieved, confused, spiteful, triumphant tears. She cries for almost the entire flight.

When they’re almost there she dashes into the airplane bathroom to wipe down her face with a makeup cleanser. She’s steady as she guides herself from the plane to the baggage claim to the train station to the train to the depot in Hasetsu, where both of her parents are waiting to greet her, and Minako smiles at them with a bare face and clear eyes.

* * *

Without morning class, without rehearsals and a season, her days seem to relax like worn-out elastic.

Minako is still working for a living—she’s setting up a new business, so she has a lot to worry about. She needs a place to live, and a place to teach, and she needs to advertise and find students. A lot of her primary school classmates are still around town, and they want to see her. There’s a whole life here to be built from scratch. But none of that work lives in her body the way dance does. She stretches in the mornings and at night, and she’s going to have to find a massage therapist here, but she doesn’t have to get up every day and do things that aggravate her injuries. The physical ease of it is luxurious. For the first week in Hasetsu she keeps looking around for the thing she must be forgetting, the item she hasn’t crossed off her to-do list. Every time, the itch she’s feeling is just the fact that she hasn’t been to class. She makes her appointments with realtors and bankers, spends peaceful hours at the copy shop running off fliers about her new studio, and still has time on her hands in the evenings to do whatever she chooses.

And all right, it’s possible that she starts drinking more than she used to, now that she isn’t performing anymore. But it’s so easy to go to Yutopia Katsuki, sit on the floor of their dining room with a bottle of soju, watch whatever is on the TV, and talk in Kyushu dialect to whoever is there. In Hasetsu, members of her parent’s generation recognize her less because of ballet than because her father drew up their wills or her mother sold them a house. They’re entertained when she tells them about the places where she has lived, but they don’t care about any of the people she met and worked with.

Minako used to think the world as seen from this little city was awfully small, but there’s a lot going on. Much more than preparing pointe shoes and rehearsing and performing and doing it again; more, even, than listening to new music and creating new dances and traveling to other cities where she did the same thing. Minako is a little abashed to realize what full lives people can have without ever thinking about professional dance. Ballet used to feel so significant to the overall direction of the culture. But here in Hasetsu, what matters is the number of customers at the onsens (healthy, but never so good that people stop worrying about it) and what’s showing at the cinema and whether the fishing has been any good lately and who people are voting for and why their neighbors are idiots for voting the way they are and how their children are growing up.

Hiroko’s children, for example. She has a girl named Mari, almost eighteen already, who works at the onsen with a serious look on her face and is otherwise very private. And she has an eleven-year-old son named Yuuri.

Katsuki Yuuri is one of the first people to see Minako’s studio after she signs the lease, before she’s put in any of the barres and mirrors that will turn an empty office into a ballet classroom. He must have learned from his mother where the studio is going to be, because he starts passing by it on his way home from school and coming right in without being invited. “I’d like to take lessons from you, Okukawa-sensei,” he tells her on his first visit, and she’s helplessly charmed and ruffles his hair and tells him that she’d be very happy to have him in her classes when they start in the fall. He doesn’t come every day, and in any case she isn’t always there, but at least once or twice a week she sees him walk into her studio with his little backpack on, looking curiously around.

“Stay away from the mirrors!” she says the first time—they’re still in their cardboard frames, leaning against one wall, and she has a brief and terrible vision of the whole stack tumbling over onto Yuuri. He says, “I will,” and keeps puttering around the room, poking his nose into corners. Once he finds a spirit level in the studio and asks her what it is. When she explains that it shows whether things are straight and flat, he goes around the room placing it on top of things. “It’s straight!” he announces, when he puts the level on top of a barre. “Good,” Minako says, amused, “it just got screwed in.” She’s starting to wonder if she should call his mother when he puts the level down and says, “Okay, thank you!” and leaves.

When the fall comes, Yuuri starts in her beginner class along with six-year-old girls. He doesn’t seem self-conscious about sticking out, just focuses on himself. He likes to show up to class early, sometimes so early that Minako suspects he is skipping school. But when she comments on it he says, “I had a free period,” and she chooses to believe him. (If he starts arriving any earlier she’ll tell Hiroko, she thinks; but he doesn’t, so she doesn’t.)

He wears long-sleeved leotards to class and covers them up with baggy sweatshirts as soon as the students are dismissed, so it takes a few months before Minako notices that he doesn’t have a soulmark.

She isn’t going to say anything about it. Yuuri must certainly have plenty of adults in his life who have talked to him about it, and he’s such a shy boy that he must hate trying to respond. But she hadn’t reckoned on Hiroko actually raising the subject at Yutopia one night, settling down next to Minako at her table without asking permission, cradling a cup of tea in her hands.

She starts discreetly: “What do you think about Yuuri?”

Minako thinks about what the question might mean, and she tries the safest option first: “It’s hard to say how he will advance as a dancer, but he’s making a good start. I know people say you have to start as a small child, but that’s not always true. He’s flexible and strong and I think he likes it.”

“Yes, I know he likes it,” Hiroko says. “Do you think it’s good for him, though? He’s a very emotional boy.”

“I,” says Minako, a little taken aback. She pushes her hair behind her ears and thinks about it. “I don’t know a lot about children. Ballet was good for me, at that age. But I was—well, I was different, you know. And I needed something to be good at.”

This is about as directly as she is willing to speak about her solo status when she hasn’t started drinking yet, but it gives Hiroko the opportunity to sigh, setting her tea down on the table, and say, “I think that he’s an empath.”

Minako takes a moment to adjust her understanding of the situation. She thinks about the boy in her ballet classes—about the way he shows up early and stays late, how he stares at himself in the mirror while practicing at the barre, how hard he tries. She wonders if those traits properly belong to Yuuri, or if they’re ways for him to cope with feeling a soulmate’s emotions alongside his own. She says, “Oh.”

“He’s an emotional boy, like I said, but it’s more than that—he feels things all the time for no reason.”

“Children do that, I hear.”

“Yes, but…he’s fighting a war with himself all the time. When he gets excited about things, he can’t get too excited or he gets...frenzied, and then exhausted. He cries out of nowhere; he gets these random bursts of energy at strange times of the day. He can almost never answer questions about how he’s feeling. I know there’s no way to be sure whether it’s a soulmate connection or his own emotions, but I’m worried about how to help him.”

“I don’t know, really,” Minako says. “Maybe it is empathy, maybe it’s just him. But he doesn’t seem moody or troubled in class, from what I can tell. I think it’s good for any child to practice something that they really have to focus on.”

Hiroko nods, looking thoughtful and a little distracted. “You remember me and Toshiya, right? We knew since we were small, and it was simple. I thought it would be like that for my children, but it’s not. Do you know, Mari’s met her soulmate and she won’t even tell us who it is? She says she’ll let us know when we need to. It makes me feel very old.”

Minako glances at Mari, who’s doing something behind the bar and is probably within earshot. Mari looks back with a dry expression as if she knows she is being talked about, but she doesn’t pause in her work. Minako does not really understand how this onsen works. Everyone in the family works at a different pace from the rest: Hiroko pushes steadily on at a task for hours at a time before sitting down with an _oof_ , Toshiya constantly putters in circles through the whole inn and picks up whatever needs doing as if nothing is urgent, and Mari enters a room and puts on a burst of activity before leaving again. They’re much less orderly than the other onsens in town, which are mostly indistinguishable to Minako, but they seem to make it work.

She asks Hiroko, “What is it you wanted to ask me about Yuuri?”

Hiroko nods, thinking. “Can you keep an eye on him for me? Let me know if he’s having trouble? I don’t want him to keep doing something that will make him upset. Or make his soulmate upset, I don’t know.”

“I think,” says Minako, “that it’s good for him. And if it’s good for him, I don’t know why it should make his soulmate upset. But even if it does, that’s their problem.”

“It’s Yuuri’s problem, too, if I’m right.”

“I know,” says Minako, even though she doesn’t know anything here—she’s guessing, really. “I’m sure it isn’t simple, but all we can really do is take care of Yuuri and help him learn. Even if he’s an empath, his soulmate is just…a stranger, somewhere. I think probably we should focus on the child we know.”

When she says that, it feels like a guess, or at most a suggestion; but over the year that follows, it will take on the nature of a vow. _Help the child you know_ , she thinks, as she opens the door on the morning of a school holiday to see Yuuri, with his dance bag, asking meekly if he can come in and practice. She thinks it as she follows him into the studio and sits on the floor with her back against one of the mirrors: “Ignore me,” she tells him, feeling like she shouldn’t leave him unattended but suspecting he doesn’t want a teacher right now. She thinks about her dance studio and wonders if business will be steady enough to support her, or if she should be considering ways to diversify her income.

After ten minutes of diligent stretching and barre exercises in silence, Yuuri casts her a doubtful glance and asks if he is doing his port-de-bras right. She gives him a small piece of advice, and he turns back to the mirror and tries it. Minako watches him for a little while, and then she slips out of the room and to get her business ledger and latest bank statement out of her office, and she spends the next half hour quietly reconciling her checkbook while keeping one eye on Yuuri.

He’s a sweet kid. Maybe he’s struggling with something, maybe there’s some other reason he wanted to be here, but maybe not. She’s trying not to crowd him or make him feel watched, but she can’t help smiling when she looks up to see him brushing one pointed foot along the floor while humming under his breath.

When he’s been there for almost three quarters of an hour, he seems to run out of things to practice. He stands at the barre for a while staring at himself in the mirror, casting momentary glances her way, and finally says, “I think I’m going to go home, Okukawa-sensei.”

She looks up from her accounts and tells him, “Okay. Can you get home by yourself all right?”

“Yes.” He looks at his feet. “I can walk. I walked here.”

She nods and lets him go, and once he’s gone she calls ahead to the onsen to let his parents know that he’s on his way home. Probably she should have called earlier, but she didn’t think of it then.

* * *

She still watches figure skating sometimes—meaning, when it comes on the TV—meaning, in Olympic years, mostly. But Japan has a promising ladies’ singles skater in the World Championships that year, and Minako has an evening free, so she is in front of the television at Yutopia Katsuki when the highlights of the competition are broadcast, and they all get to watch together as Arakawa Shizuka lands seven clean triple jumps and a world title.

Minako still finds skating disappointing a lot of the time. As a ballerina she’s looking for the kind of innovation and expression that athletes can’t often deliver. But going a long time without seeing any kind of dance feels like starving, so she takes what she can get. Yuuri is sitting at one of the tables, purportedly doing his homework where his parents can keep an eye on him while they work. Minako prods him in the side to point out what Arakawa is doing on the screen, gliding sideways with one foot in front of the other and her entire torso bent way backwards as if she’s trying to put her head down on the ice. “Her feet are in fourth position,” Minako says. “See how good her flexibility is?”

Yuuri says, politely, “The TV people said it was called an Ina Bauer.”

“Right!” She’s pleased that he was paying such good attention, even if she forgot that term. “That’s what it’s called in figure skating. It was fourth position first.”

They’re talking over the performance, and a part of Minako wants to quiet down and watch, but she’s happy to be connecting with Yuuri. “You could try this!” she tells him. “Men do it too. Hasetsu has a rink!” She’s excited by this idea, but Yuuri doesn’t seem to be listening. He watches closely as Arakawa finishes her program, collects her flowers, leaves the ice and gets a bear hug from her coach, a blond Russian woman in an enormous coat. Minako’s seen her on TV before—Tatiana Tarasova, a kind of mother hen to half the Russian skaters and some of the best non-Russian ones too. Minako looks sidelong at Yuuri and imagines greeting him with a hug as he finishes a routine, but the idea almost makes her laugh. He’s a reserved little boy who likes his personal space.

It occurs to Minako that she hasn’t touched other people much since she came home. Is it a relief to be home, far from the constant closeness of a professional company and the showy intimacy of Europeans, or is she feeling a little touch-starved? She wonders this for a moment and then files the question away to think about later. Right now she’s with her student, and he might need something.

Maybe he needs someone to shove him in the direction of things he might want until he admits that he wants them. Minako always performed that service for herself, but not all children are so self-sufficient. “Hey,” she says. “They have open skate at the Ice Castle all the time. Every week at least. We could try it together. Do you want to go?”

Yuuri looks at her with a serious expression and blinks his enormous eyes a few times. “Okay,” he says. “Maybe. I’ll try. Okay.”

When they go, he takes to the ice slowly, thoughtfully, and he falls down very soon. But he’s low to the ground and bounces back easily. He soon figures out that it’s easier to stay upright if he moves faster. Forgetting his manners, he dashes ahead of Minako to collide head-on with a girl about his age wearing a ribbon in her hair, and they both crash to the ice.

“Ouch!” the girl cries, rubbing her arm where Yuuri headbutted her.

“Sorry,” Yuuri mutters, trying to get up. His feet keep slipping out from underneath him until he falls back on his tailbone with an even harder impact than the first one. Minako skates over to him, unsteadily, and helps by bracing one hand against the boards at the edge of the rink and extending the other to Yuuri. He gets up, bows rapidly to the girl, and skates off again.

“Look where you’re going!” Minako calls after him, and she issues her own apology to the girl and skates off after him. Was that sufficient? How much do you need to apologize to a child after she falls down? Children do fall down a lot; probably it is fine.

For years afterward Minako will remember this day every time she sees Yuuko around the ice rink and will try to remember if that was the girl Yuuri ran into; but every time, she has to admit that she didn’t get a good look at that girl. 

Yuuri likes it enough that he enrolls in the beginners’ figure skating class, and then he makes such rapid progress that he’s bumped up to the class Yuuko is in, even though she grew up at the ice rink and is two years older. From that point on she is the closest friend Yuuri has, the only one he ever mentions to Minako, and Minako toys with the notion of their being soulmates but doesn’t say anything about it out loud. (At least, not when she’s sober. She has a faint memory of saying something about it to Hiroko, one night over so many bottles of Sapporo she’s lost count, and Hiroko pursing her lips and looking mysterious about it; but maybe that was a dream.) Some part of her hopes that those two are going to turn out to be a match, and then she can stop waking up in the middle of the night wondering how she can mentor a child through not having a soulmate when she still doesn’t know how she’s pulling it off herself—or worse, how to mentor an empath through the storms of adolescence with someone else’s emotions pouring in from an unknown source.

“You can take time off,” she tells him one afternoon when he’s early again, warming up at the barre before class, scrutinizing his own form in the mirror. “You don’t have to perform all the time.” She remembers feeling relieved when her first teacher said this to her. Yuuri looks at her briefly in the mirror and says, “I know,” and carries on.

She wonders if it’s counterproductive for her to show up at Yutopia, if she’s intruding on his down time. But half the time she doesn’t even see him there, and she likes seeing Hiroko, so she keeps going.

* * *

Yuuri is twelve years old the first time she sees him watching Victor Nikiforov skate. It’s afternoon at Yutopia, and the television is showing some kind of skating recap, filling viewers in on a junior-level competition that didn’t get properly aired. The announcers keep talking over the program, but Yuuri is transfixed.

“Victor is my favorite,” he informs her. “He won junior worlds with the highest score in history.”

“That doesn’t mean much, does it?” she says. “They just changed the judging system a couple years ago. It’s not like you can compare his scores to Brian Boitano.”

Yuuri furrows his brow a little, as if he doesn’t understand what she’s saying, and keeps watching the television. She knows what it is like to love a performance, but there’s something more than that in the way Yuuri draws in his breath before every jump, the way he lets it out and clenches both his fists every time Victor lands steady and sure and opens into a spread eagle. Victor skates like a kid—he’s bouncy, cheerful, more flexible than he is graceful—but he’s got a pretty good handle on maintaining a serene face while doing hard work. And Yuuri has sweat standing on his brow as if he’s the one under the spotlight. He cares incredibly much. More, perhaps, than the performance itself can account for.

Minako manages, with some effort, to refrain from teasing. Instead she says to Yuuri, “If you make it to worlds, you could skate on the same ice as him.” Yuuri looks startled, like he forgot she was there, and says, “That’s what I’m going to do.”

Of course, it’s a long time coming. Yuuri starts fighting harder, placing higher. Victor graduates to seniors the next year, so they’re never at the same competitions, but Yuuri travels to the closer Junior Grand Prix competitions and makes third alternate to the final, and then he makes first alternate to Junior Worlds, and he grows into a tall boy with a real skating coach, contemplating his move to seniors. He stays in Minako’s ballet classes and he’s the most advanced student there; she suggests private tutoring but he’s too thrifty to pay the extra tuition, and as much as she would like to cut him a deal, she can’t actually afford it. Hasetsu is struggling lately, and ballet classes are a luxury product for middle-class parents. She’s already running a snack bar as well as her studio. Sometimes Yuuri shows up there at closing time, well after he should be asleep, and asks her if she’ll go with him to the rink.

She is touched that he trusts her to watch over him like this. (Part of her wonders if he asks her because she’s the only adult he knows who stays up late.) His coach is a middle-aged man in Saga named Matsuo whom he sees a couple times a week, and it seems like their relationship is functional but minimalistic. Most of the city is tucked into bed by the time she chases the recalcitrant final customers from her snack bar and wipes down the counters. She and Yuuri walk down quiet streets to the ice rink, where she lets them both in with the key that the manager agreed to give out only if an adult would keep it, and she watches Yuuri skate figures and practice jumps and try again, again, again.

Minako has never had someone need her this way, or this much. Not one particular person. She can’t remember ever having that kind of need, either; she depended on her mother and her teachers to fulfill those roles. She never sought out another adult because she was missing something, never thought of leaving her home late at night to go ask someone for help. She’s touched that Yuuri is willing to ask her for this, and at the same time it makes her nervous that she won’t be able to live up to it. These days she feels at ease in her classroom, but everything else she does for this delicate firecracker of a child—staying up late, learning a whole new vocabulary of leg wraps and muscled jumps, putting a positive spin on his competitive results—feels like something she might mess up at any moment.

Patterns have a way of repeating themselves. Minako used to bite her lip, painfully embarrassed, when her first teacher talked to her about her weight, or when an instructor lectured the class about good dietary habits and she heard accusation in their voice, or even if she was at her goal performing size and the ballet master was just reminding her to eat lean protein and refrain from alcohol. She thought she might do better once she got some authority herself, but in fact she does much worse. Now that she is a teacher herself she hears herself talking to her students about their weight with the same sharp and pitiless reprimand in her voice. You do what you’ve learned how to do. It’s possible she’s never learned how to be, never even seen an example of, the kind of teacher Yuuri needs.

Still, she is who he is, so she does her best. And fortunately, although she has become Yuuri’s chief support apart from family, he isn’t hers. She’s been putting in the work to rekindle old friendships, and she’s gradually finding out what kind of person she is without the strictures of a ballet career.

For a while she becomes a little boy-crazy, mostly making off-color remarks about movie stars to make her friends laugh, picking up momentary crushes that are mostly for show and then discarding them again. As a dancer she indulged in a show of flirtation every once in a while, but always just a show, staged against the backdrop of her unmatched status and her devotion to her career, never crossing a line into anything scandalous. Nowadays she’s falling into an odd, comfortable pattern with her friends in Hasetsu. They’ve long since learned not to act sorry for her and instead point out every attractive man they see, making salacious jokes to Minako about how she might corrupt them.

In the past, conversations like these seemed so dangerous. She recalls the trepidation with which she invited Martin from Aix-en-Provence up to her apartment in Paris, the way they didn’t end up doing anything together, the odd buoyancy she felt when he left. Such tiny things to have so much importance in her memory.

But now that she’s home, her friends all assume she had daring romantic exploits while abroad. Everyone knows, after all, that Westerners don’t take soulmates as seriously. (That is and isn’t true; Westerners could make the same claim about the Japanese, and they would also be both right and wrong simultaneously; she doesn’t try to explain.) It always seemed like an affair would be more work than it was worth, but there’s a freedom in letting everyone assume she’s already had several of them. There’s nothing to prove, so she relaxes into the role. Someone asks her about Eiji and his supposed wild days in Europe, and Minako says truthfully, “We worked on one or two mutual projects.” She tosses off the phrase _mutual projects_ with an affected airiness and raises her eyebrows as if it means more than it does. The conversation moves on with a laugh. There’s nothing to deny and nothing to prove; she finds, for once, a treasurable privacy in the fact that no one is sure what she’s about.

* * *

Yuuri is sixteen when he lingers at the end of a ballet class and asks, “Can I talk to you about something?”

“Of course,” Minako says. She goes through her post-class routine of shutting off the CD player, seeing off the other students, and putting away her attendance sheets and lesson plans, and then she waves Yuuri back to the corner of her studio that she treats as an office.

“What’s up?” she says, plopping into her rolling chair.

Yuuri looks down and brushes his hands against his dance clothes as if trying to dust himself off. He doesn’t seem to want to sit down. Or to tell her what he wanted to talk about.

“Okay,” Minako says. “Is it about ballet?”

“Not really,” he says.

“Is it about skating?”

“Yes.”

“Did something happen?”

“No, stop—stop prompting me.” He takes a deep breath and looks her in the eye. “I want to find a new coach. A real—I mean. A more advanced coach. And I think I’ll have to move away. Maybe really far.”

Minako nods, giving him a minute in case he wants to explain further. “Okay. Do you want me to help, or did you just want to talk to me about it?”

“A little of both?” He finally sits down. She almost never has actual meetings here, so the other chair is a straight-backed wooden one that teeters a little. Yuuri perches on it with his head held high like he’s balancing on a beam. He might be a nervous kid, but after six years of ballet with her he’s good at acting physically confident at all times. “I’ve talked to Matsuo-sensei—I mean, he kind of talked about it to me first. He doesn’t coach many seniors and if I…he can’t travel much, so…”

“If you do more international competitions he can’t go with you,” Minako finishes.

“Right. And he thinks it’s time, and I…agree.” He’s having a hard time with this. Minako can only imagine how difficult it was having the earlier conversation with his coach.

“Yuuri,” she says—as gently as she can, which is not very—“I think it would be wonderful for you to have a coach who can travel with you. To Europe and North America and the Grand Prix Series and Worlds. I think you should compete in and win all those things. How can I help?”

He smiles at her, nervous and grateful. His ambition seems to cost him so much, emotionally, that sometimes Minako wonders whether it’s his own or if he’s getting it over his soulmate connection. But right now he’s all Yuuri, entirely Hiroko’s brave little boy. He takes in a deep breath and says, “I can get help from Matsuo-sensei on making a reel, and trying out with coaches, but could I talk to you about it too? To have a second opinion? And I mean, you’re the only person I know who ever moved abroad, so it would help if I could talk to you about that.”

“I’m happy to help,” she says, but she feels a little melancholy as she realizes this is an end to one more chapter of her life, coming sooner than she expected.

* * *

Yuuri is gone for five years, and that’s not as long a time as it used to be. Hasetsu shrinks a little; the onsens close up shop, one by one, until only Yutopia Katsuki is left. Minako increasingly relies upon her snack bar for income, with the dance studio becoming something of a side gig. The advantage of the snack bar is that she sees a lot of people, and that’s nice. She’s embedded in this community, and it’s not exactly idyllic, but it’s peaceful. She answers only to herself, and she has friends when she needs them. She works hard, comes home tired, and sleeps well.

When Yuuri calls home heartbroken from his first Grand Prix Final, Minako is surprised. She thought he was doing well, or well enough not to sob like that about one competition. When he announces he’s leaving Celestino and coming home, she worries. When the first thing he does upon arriving home is go to the rink and skate one of Victor’s routines, though, she remembers asking herself if those two could possibly be soulmates, and when Victor barges into town within a week she’s certain she was right.

Minako likes Victor. In truth she’s done her fair share of fawning over him onscreen when she’s had too much to drink. But when they’re in the same room she keeps that under her hat and enjoys observing him. He’s so enchanted by everything Hasetsu has to offer that he seems like a small child, except for the moments when his fatigue shows through and she recognizes how his sport has aged him. Skating is even crueler than ballet in that respect; he’s ten years younger than she was when she retired, yet he’s the elder statesman of men’s skating.

When he comes around to her snack bar she’s surprised, until it becomes obvious that he was looking for Yuuri. “If someone told you he was at my place, they meant my dance studio,” she explains. “He likes to practice late at night. Sometimes he goes to the rink then. I usually go with him.” She says this in present tense even though Yuuri hasn’t needed her to go with him to the rink for a long time.

Victor looks forlorn. “We danced together, you know. The first time we met. I thought it meant something but I don’t think he thought so, if he keeps sneaking off to dance alone.”

“He’s always done that. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“No, of course it doesn’t.” Victor sighs dramatically, blowing the hair off his forehead, and looks at her sideways. “Did he ever…well.”

“What?”

“Are you…I mean, I’ve heard about you before.”

He’s struggling to say something, and Minako takes a guess: “Are you trying to ask me a question about soulmates?”

He smiles nervously. “That would be rude!”

“Yes, it would.” She’d like to help him and Yuuri be happy, and happy together if that’s what should happen, but she’s had enough of that kind of question. “We can talk about teaching Yuuri, but if you have something else to sort out you should talk to him about it.”

“Teaching,” Victor mutters glumly, but he takes himself away to the ice rink.

She does wonder what he was going to ask, even though she didn’t want him to ask it. Victor has the recognizable habits of someone who was starting to believe he was alone. He clings to Yuuri like a leech, leans against him at dinners or while watching skating videos, talks about him all the time. To listen to him, you’d never know that Victor was a world-record-holding athlete; he seems like an enamored child. He sounds, in fact, a little like Yuuri used to sound when talking about Victor.

Yuuri on the other hand seems rattled, nervous, especially when Yuri Plisetsky shows up out of nowhere and they set up an impromptu competition between them. Minako thinks this is great: competitive skating in Hasetsu! A real performance, an event! It’s like something out of her old life, but assembled by the people she loves, in her hometown. She takes Yuuko’s triplets around town to put up posters and acts so cheerful about the whole thing that Yuuri only barely looks nervous around her, only sometimes lets his facade crack. “This is a _good thing,_ Yuuri,” she tells him. “You need to compete again, and now you get to do it on home turf! With all your family and friends there to support you!”

“Right,” he says, “with everybody I know watching.” He closes his eyes, blows air out of his mouth and looks a little sick.

He wears that expression more or less constantly until the night before the competition. When he knocks on Minako’s door, she pauses in the middle of writing an email to Defne, gets up from the couch and finds Yuuri standing there bright-eyed and inspired, asking her to teach him how to move like a woman.

“What?” she says, leaning against her doorframe.

“I know what I need to do to make this performance surprising!”

She’s tempted to argue with him. He’s already a more mature skater than Plisetsky, plus it’s late. Sleep might serve him better than revising his whole on-ice gender presentation. But he came to her with this question, not anyone else. She won’t let him down.

Yuuri explains the story he’s been seeing in his short program: a playboy comes to town—“What town?” Minako interrupts. Yuuri seems confused. “Is this a Japanese story, the way you’re telling it?” she asks. “Because it matters what kind of love affair these characters think is possible.”

“Oh. I was picturing it in Spain, maybe? The music sounds Spanish to me.”

“Okay. You’re imagining a Western bond-breaker, someone who doesn’t pay attention to soulmarks and tempts people into falling in love with him. A Don Juan type.”

“I guess so.”

“Remember that’s a fairy tale, but keep going.”

“I thought I was supposed to be him,” he says, blushing a little but rushing onward. “But that’s not who I am. I should be playing the beautiful woman. That’s how I’m going to surprise Victor.”

“Why?” Minako asks. They’re up in her studio now, and she’s stretching, bent over double with her palms on the floor. She straightens up and tilts her head at him. “Why do you think you’re the woman?”

Yuuri purses his lips. “I think…I don’t want to be aggressive.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not how I act; I don’t know how to do it.”

“You’re a performer, Yuuri. You can play a character that’s not like you.”

“Right, but—well, I tried being like that, and it felt wrong. Like, awkward and choppy.”

Things start to make sense. “I see. It’s not just the character, it’s the physical way you imagine that character should be expressed. You think he should be aggressively forward, move sharply?”

Yuuri blushes deeper. “Maybe.”

“But that messes with your skating, doesn’t it? You’re good at being smooth and connected, so this plays against your strengths.”

“…Yeah,” Yuuri says, thoughtful. He puts one leg up on the barre and bends his torso over it, straight-backed, while he thinks. When he comes up he says, “I do think it’s more than that. I can’t see or feel the character. When I think about the woman I know how she feels.”

Of course Yuuri, gentle Yuuri with no soulmark but someone else’s feelings rattling around in his head, identifies less with the playboy—the unfaithful, the bond-breaker—than he does with the woman waiting to find her match, entertaining the idea that this might be the one, only to be abandoned. For a moment Minako feels terribly sad. She’s seen this program, and she didn’t see the “woman gets cast aside” ending in it until Yuuri described it to her that way. She’s worried that he’s thinking too much about abandonment.

But this story is still in progress, and Yuuri has come to her for help changing its ending. Victor doesn’t have to abandon him, not if Yuuri skates in a way that convinces him to stay. That shouldn’t require much.

“So, there’s moving like a woman who does Spanish dances in some town square,” she says. “And there’s moving like a ballerina, and there’s moving like a ladies’ figure skater. Those are all different. You’re probably not going to throw in a ladies’ skating move like a spiral, but the good news is you already have good flexibility. Remember Shizuka with her layback Ina Bauer?”

“Of course.”

“Think about that. Even if you can’t throw one into the choreography.”

They go through examples like that: throw your arms over your head like a ballerina who’s just fallen backwards into her partner’s arms, or swoosh them out like you’re holding a full skirt and flinging it around, or try this gesture—she stands in front of him and has him mirror her as she runs her hands down her sides. She remembers doing this at the beginning of a solo sometime with the Ishikawa Ballet, pretending to check her position in space when she already knew the answer, telling the audience, _here I am. This is what you get_.

They work together for an hour. She watches Yuuri whittle out all the parts of the program that don’t suit his purpose. He’s still going to act decisive, enamored, sexy. But this way he doesn’t have to chase, so he can glide backwards as the object of pursuit while preparing for a jump. The triple axel will be like a decision point, the one forward jump that propels him into the rest of the program, entering into this affair that promises to end as soon as it began. He tries out a lot of added small gestures like passing a hand over his hair, or holding it momentarily in front of his face as if he’s hiding behind a fan, or brushing it casually over a part of his body to draw attention to it. He makes himself asymmetrical and half-turned away. Minako isn’t sure what to call half of these small moves, but if they make Yuuri feel feminine, if he can connect to the program this way, then it’s worth it.

The next day Yuuri wins decisively. It’s not just that he has more “feeling” or “maturity” than Plisetsky, though the spectators immediately talk about it that way; his basic skating skills are some of the best in the world. Working with Celestino Cialdini was obviously a good decision. He moves on deep, fast, quiet edges, gets low into his spins, and has a way of changing direction swiftly on one foot that makes Minako’s breath catch. He incorporates last night’s lesson smoothly, as confidently flirtatious as if he’d slept for eight hours and not, at most, four. He’s always been so resilient. She finds him afterward to give him a hug and exclaim over his performance, and for once it seems like he’s able to accept the compliment. 

Yuri Plisetsky leaves. Victor stays. Minako expects things to go more smoothly from then on, but it’s not long before Yuuri is in her studio alone again, working through something he won’t explain. Empathic soulmates are supposed to know one another’s hearts without speaking. But it seems that for an anxious pair of habitual non-communicators, this mostly means that they come a hair closer to telling each other the truth than they do with the rest of the world. Yuuri insults his own skating sometimes and Victor feels wounded that his coaching hasn’t improved Yuuri’s self-esteem; Victor mentions his home and Yuuri decides he must be going back there soon.

Minako hears about these things in late night practice sessions, or in text messages from Yuuri, who apparently considers her a safe confidante. Minako responds to these texts with full, punctuated sentences with no emojis. She tells him, “That sounds hard.” Or she applies logic to the situation: “It sounds like he doesn’t believe you when you tell him what you need.” But she doesn’t give advice. This is probably the reason Yuuri confides in her.

After Yuuri and Victor throw the skating world into an uproar with their kiss in China, it seems like they have gotten onto the same page about their relationship, which is a relief—it’s frankly a little weird of Victor to hang around his soulmate acting like his employee. But then it all goes south again. Yuuri ends up at Minako’s snack bar, crying into a packet of peanuts and a diet soda because she refuses to serve him anything higher in calories. He can’t stop thinking about how Victor threatened to leave him when he was having a panic attack in China, how he can’t trust that Victor is going to stay.

“Is this a game for you two?” Minako asks, abruptly, when Yuuri stops for breath. “The way you hurt each other. Is it like a scene? Do you trade roles?”

“WHAT, Minako, NO, it’s not a GAME,” Yuuri shrieks, “what are you TALKING ABOUT.”

She shrugs. “Well you can’t blame me for asking. I imagine the makeup sex is pretty good.” She is, she decides, done being tactful about other people’s weird soulmate relationships.

Yuuri makes a sound that must have been entirely involuntary, throws his empty peanut packet at her face, and runs out of the snack bar. He shows up to their ballet practice session the next day but won’t meet her eyes. Maybe I was wrong, she thinks. Maybe the makeup sex isn’t very good and they just cry all over each other.

* * *

By the time the Grand Prix Final comes up, Victor and Yuuri are communicating better, it seems. At least, Yuuri is skating better, and she’s hearing less about their relationship, whatever they’re calling it now. They probably don’t need her to go along. But she’s at the onsen bar when they are talking about travel arrangements, and when Yuuri mentions having access to discounted tickets, Minako leaps into the conversation and says something like, “That’s so exciting, Yuuri! I would love to be there to see you skate!” and then he can’t get out of inviting her.

She really was planning on watching him skate and otherwise having a low-key time in Barcelona. She wasn’t expecting to end up eating dinner with five-sixths of the men’s field, or to have a competition of performative eyelash-batting with Christophe Giacometti, or to have Phichit chatter at her about things he and Yuuri did in Detroit. She definitely isn’t expecting Yuuri and Victor to show up in matching rings and announce that 1) they’re getting married, 2) no they’re not, they just exchanged omamori in the shape of wedding rings, how could they get married, 3) they’re soulmates, 4) they can’t possibly be soulmates, Yuuri would have _known_ , 5) of course Yuuri knows, they’ve known since Sochi, 6) what on earth happened in Sochi, 7) please excuse us we need to talk. The party breaks up into confused congratulations and condolences.

Minako feels a little put out. She's worried about Yuuri, but she's not the one to help him sort out this situation, and before dinner went to hell she was having a good time and wasn’t ready for it to end. Anyway jetlag has her too confused about the time to go to bed yet, so she ends up in a bar near the official competition hotel with Celestino Cialdini.

“I saw you at the Olympics,” she tells him. “I had this tiny little flat in Copenhagen, but I owned a TV, so I had all my friends over to watch the figure skating. Everyone loved you. Best partnering in the whole competition.”

“Why thank you,” he says, but he seems sad, and all of a sudden she remembers that he skated with his soulmate at those Olympics and—“I’m so sorry,” she blurts out, “about how your soulmate died. That’s so sad, I can’t imagine.”

“Better to have loved and lost...” Celestino says, and then he gets embarrassed and trails off, looking at her like he shouldn’t have said that, or like he’s hoping she doesn’t know the rest of the line. She does. She’s not sure if it’s from a poem or a song or just a cliché, but it’s the kind of phrase that people without soulmates learn quickly in any language they speak, whether they wanted to or not. It’s easy to tell when people are talking about you, and when they’re doing it with pity; you pick up the customary terms.

But Celestino is deep in his own self-pity, and he has extremely good hair, and Minako has had a lot of wine and is feeling generous, so rather than a tart reply she says, “Sure. And it’s better to have finished fifth at the Olympics than never to have gone at all, hm?” Wait, that might be a little cruel. Is he sensitive about that? She places a hand on her chest and talks about herself, because she’s better at that. “Better to have ruined my knees than never to have been Giselle.” She picks up her empty glass and makes a vaguely toast-like gesture in his direction. “Better to have had wine in Barcelona with a handsome man than never to have had wine in Barcelona. I think we need some food. Do they serve food here? Tapas or something? I don’t understand tapas. How do they work?”

He says, a little petulantly, “I’m Italian, not Spanish.” She rolls her eyes because obviously she knows that, and he says, “Let’s order some ceviche,” and of course they end up having some more wine with it.

It’s hard to keep track of glasses when you’re sharing a bottle, but when Minako’s had enough to feel bold, however much that is, she abruptly decides she’s doing this, slams her glass down, and tells Celestino he’s coming back to her room.

The decisive moment passes almost immediately. “All of my…” he says. “Everyone I know. In skating. They’re all in town. Mostly in the same hotel. I really don’t want to walk past them all in the morning.” 

“So don’t stay the night,” she says, which is maybe a little cold.

“Also we’ve had. A lot of drinks.”

Minako announces, “We just need some water.”

She gets the waiter to refill both their water glasses. They end up drinking them in one long go while maintaining eye contact as if they’re carrying out a dare. Celestino’s the first one to crack and start giggling, but Minako follows soon after, and then he almost chokes and she thwacks him ineffectually on the back for a while. Once he’s caught his breath again and stopped making hideous hacking noises, the mood is pretty well killed, and they’ve both remembered that they have early morning commitments.

“Rain check?” Celestino says, apologetically. Minako squints, trying to remember what that phrase means. “Another time,” he clarifies. “After the short program?”

“What if your skater wipes out and you’re depressed?”

“There is nothing that can happen during a performance of Phichit’s ‘Shall We Skate’ that would make anyone depressed.” He’s smiling now, but he still looks tipsy, and God only knows when he last slept. It’s been well over twenty-four hours since Minako did, and she feels a little relieved at the thought of going back to her hotel room alone, putting on pajamas and flipping through the channels on the hotel television, sleeping quiet and sprawled on clean sheets. She pets Celestino’s hair a little bit while waiting for the bill, and by the time it comes she’s persuaded him to take it down and let her run her hands through it once or twice. If they look odd, well, she doesn’t see any figure skating coaches _in this very bar with them._ They’ll be fine. It’s all fine.

The cold air outside the restaurant runs down to the bottom of her lungs. She shakes Celestino’s hand, mock-businesslike, before turning to go back to her hotel, half-dancing up the street in a distracted, childish series of sashay steps. No one sees her, or perhaps everyone sees her and no one cares. Hasetsu is thousands and thousands of miles away. She could catch a train from here to any major city in Europe and find a friend or colleague, and for a moment that’s a comforting thought: the people who care about her are scattered like a net all over the world, numerous enough to catch her anywhere she falls. But tonight she’s alone in Barcelona, a single ridiculous person in a foreign city, and no one, no one, no one can lay a claim to her.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a lot of good discussions out there of what it's like for dancers to retire, but my favorites are the BBC Radio documentary [A Dancer Dies Twice](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b075pm41) and the film _Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan_. 
> 
> The line about ballet masters thinking of the whole company, while dancers think only about themselves, is a paraphrased quote from Peter Martins, before he got fired as artistic director of the New York City Ballet. Oh, and "best partnering in the competition" is what Scott Hamilton said about Sui & Han in Pyeongchang. That's it for direct quotes in this chapter, but drop me a line if you want to hear about the ballet documentaries and webseries and podcasts that provided general background info for the fic. There were a lot of them.
> 
> Shizuka Arakawa's competitive career was a little too early to get much love from the YOI fandom, but she did a lot for Japanese figure skating, and her layback Ina Bauer really is incredible. I like [this introductory post about her](https://the-real-xmonster.tumblr.com/post/176825049234/for-the-second-issue-in-my-getting-to-know-series).
> 
> Thanks again to my betas, chestnut_filly and postmodern_robot. If you liked this, you should check out chestnut_filly's [Lilia/Minako fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12068310).
> 
> And thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed the story, I'd love to hear from you.


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